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Home / Horizon Europe / HORIZON-CL5-2026-09-D4-08

Full-scale demonstration of heat upgrade solutions in industrial processes

Open now · HORIZON Innovation Actions · HORIZON-CL5-2026-09-D4-08

Next cut-off
15 Sept '26
in 9 days
Per grant
€9.0M
the call's own average
Grants expected
2
projects that will be funded
Funding rate
70%
the rest is your own money

In context of Horizon Europe

This grant€9.0M
The track runs to the largest grant in Horizon Europe (€171M). The median across the 482 calls we publish is €5.3M, this one is above it.

What this call funds

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

  • Based on the results of the project, at least one industrial sector with a significant heating demand in the EU and Associated Countries develops pathways and business models to measurably increase the recovery and upgrade of locally available heat for covering process needs and significantly or totally phasing out of fossil fuel use, while preserving or enhancing its global competitiveness.
  • Measurable improvement of renewable and/or industrial excess/waste heat recovery and upgrade solutions, possibly combined with thermal and/or electrical energy storage, in terms of energy efficiency, flexibility of electrical demand, climate and environment protection, reliability and safety, physical and cyber security, and profitability.

Scope:

This topic aims to satisfy the need for process heat in the more industrial sectors by upgrading excess/waste heat from the process itself, possibly combined with heat recovered in nearby locations or local renewable heat, as a cost-efficient way to improve energy efficiency and reduce the GHG emissions and air pollutants and the use of fossil fuels. Thermal and/or electrical energy storage can be integrated, if it can contribute to better matching heat sources with process needs and/or to offer more flexible electricity consumption from the grid.

The temperature of the heat supplied to the process is not specified, but the proposals will be evaluated on their potential to enable the deployment of heat upgrade solutions in more sector(s) and process(es), where they are not yet state-of-the art.

Projects must address all the following items:

Trimmed here, the full scope, expected outcomes and award criteria are on the official topic page ↗.

What applying costs you

ItemEstimateNote
Drafting effort6–8 weekssingle submission
Partner search4–8 weeksruns in parallel, and it is the part that slips
Your own money€3.9M30% of project cost, over the project's life
Time to first payment6–9 monthscut-off → evaluation → grant agreement

These are Bemzu's estimates from the call's structure (the number of stages and whether a consortium is required) not figures published by the Commission. Only the co-financing share is read from the call itself.

Where these conditions come from

Two kinds of row. Most are the sentence we read the condition from, quoted out of the call itself. Some say plainly that they are not a quotation but the programme's own rule for this type of action, the EU portal publishes a table of contents where the conditions should be, so for a Research and Innovation Action the rate comes from the rulebook rather than from the fiche.

ConditionQuoted from the call, or the rule behind it
Consortium sizeNot quoted from this call — Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are at least three independent legal entities from three different Member States or Associated Countries, at least one established in a Member State.
Funding rateNot quoted from this call — Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are funded at 70% of eligible costs for profit-making organisations, and 100% for non-profit legal entities — the rate shown here is the one that applies to a company.
Maturitynull Activities are expected to achieve TRL 7-8 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

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