Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2667 actions· ✨ 89 recent

The European Commission approved on 30 March 2026 an Italian state aid scheme (SA.118992) worth up to €6 billion to support domestic production of renewable hydrogen for the transport and industrial sectors, running through 31 December 2029. The scheme operates via two-way contracts for difference (CfD): a strike price is set through competitive bidding, with Italy compensating producers when market prices fall below the strike price and producers reimbursing the state when prices exceed it. SA.118992 is the first sectorally-specialised renewable-hydrogen CISAF approval on the register — distinct from the cleantech- manufacturing cohort (solar/wind/batteries) — and at €6 billion is the largest individual CISAF approval to date, roughly 4× the Bulgaria SA.120414 electricity-price precedent and ~2× Germany SA.121215.

The European Commission approved Luxembourg's €500 million state aid scheme (SA.120921) under Section 6.1 of the Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework (CISAF), authorising support for strategic investments that add cleantech manufacturing capacity in net-zero technologies including solar, wind, heat pumps, and batteries (including production using secondary raw materials). Aid may be granted until 31 December 2030. This is the first CISAF cleantech manufacturing capacity approval for a small EU Member State, establishing a per-capita-quantum precedent distinct from Germany SA.121215 (large MS) and Greece SA.117469 (mid MS), and closes the Luxembourg-issuer gap in the 2026 CISAF cohort.

The European Commission approved France's €1.1 billion state aid scheme (SA.120765) under Section 6.1 of the Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework (CISAF), authorising a tax credit (Crédit d'Impôt Industrie Verte — C3IV) for strategic investments that add new cleantech manufacturing capacity in solar PV, onshore and offshore wind technologies, heat pumps, and battery technologies. The scheme is available across the whole of France until 31 December 2028 and is the eighth CISAF cleantech-manufacturing- capacity approval, bringing cumulative CISAF cleantech support to over €10 billion. It is the first CISAF approval delivered via a tax-credit instrument, distinct from the grant-based architectures used in the parallel Germany SA.121215, Greece SA.117469, and Luxembourg SA.120921 approvals.

The European Commission approved Greece's €400 million state aid scheme (SA.117469) under Section 6.1 of the Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework (CISAF), authorising support for strategic investments that add cleantech manufacturing capacity in net-zero technologies including solar, wind, batteries, heat pumps, and electrolysers, as well as related critical-raw-material processing and secondary-raw-material recovery. Aid is delivered via direct grants and tax advantages and may be granted until 31 December 2030. This is the first non-Germany CISAF cleantech manufacturing capacity approval (announced 18 days after Germany SA.121215) and fills the Greek-issuer gap in the 2026 CISAF cohort, establishing the mid-sized Member State implementation precedent for Section 6.1 instruments.

Brazil's federal innovation-financing agency FINEP (Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos), under the MCTI/FNDCT umbrella, published a BRL 215.2 million (~USD 40.8 million) public call — "Finep Mais Inovação Brasil – Transformação Mineral" — offering non-repayable economic-subsidy grants for private-sector research, development and innovation projects across five thematic lines: critical and strategic minerals for the energy transition, urban mining (recovery of high-value materials from e-waste, batteries, photovoltaic cells and wind-turbine magnets), rare-earth magnets, sustainable mining technologies, and decarbonization of mineral transformation. Applicant companies must partner with a Scientific, Technological and Innovation Institution (ICT). Proposal submission opened 2026-02-06 and, per the official call page, the deadline was later extended from 2026-08-31 to 2026-09-04 18:00 (Brasília time).

The European Commission approved a €3 billion German state aid scheme (SA.121215) under the Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework (CISAF), authorising federal support for strategic investments in cleantech manufacturing capacity across Germany through 31 December 2030. Aid is delivered via grants, tax advantages, and interest subsidies or guarantees for new loans, and is open to companies across the entire German territory. Eligible activities cover the production of net-zero technologies listed in Annex II of the CISAF — including batteries, solar PV, wind turbines, electrolysers, heat pumps, and CCUS equipment — as well as the production of new or recovered critical raw materials necessary for those final products and main specific components. This is the first €3-billion-tier individual CISAF approval in the register and establishes Germany as the principal Member State implementer of the Clean Industrial Deal's manufacturing-capacity investment pillar.

The New Development Bank (NDB), the BRICS-founded multilateral development bank headquartered in Shanghai, signed a USD 100 million equivalent, five-year RMB-denominated loan agreement with Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank Co Ltd for the "Greener Shanghai Project." The facility is an on-lending line: Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank will channel the proceeds to sustainable sub-projects across the city, including wind and solar power, environmental-conservation infrastructure, and digital-infrastructure development, expected to benefit roughly 25 million residents of Shanghai and the wider Yangtze River Delta. NDB below-market development-bank pricing functions as an indirect state-adjacent subsidy for Shanghai's green and digital-infrastructure build-out.

On 2026-01-15 the People's Bank of China announced a CNY 400 billion increase to its science-and-technology-innovation and equipment-renewal relending facility (科技创新和技术改造再贷款), raising the total quota from CNY 800 billion to CNY 1.2 trillion. The measure supports the optimized implementation of the "two new" (equipment renewal / consumer trade-in) policy programme, and from 2026 extends eligibility to private small and medium-sized enterprises with relatively high R&D spending, which were previously excluded from this relending window.

The European Investment Bank signed a EUR 175 million green loan with Iberdrola on 15 January 2026 to finance two new wind farms (274 MW combined, 38 turbines of 7.2 MW) integrated into Iberdrola's Tâmega pumped-storage hydropower complex in northern Portugal, part of a roughly EUR 350 million total investment. The loan is guaranteed by Spain's export credit agency Cesce, marking the second use of the EIB-Cesce guarantee instrument that backs green projects led by Spanish companies outside Spain. Global Trade Alert logs the loan as a "red" state-loan intervention on the same grounds as the first Cesce-backed EIB-Iberdrola operation (Windanker, Germany): below-market multilateral financing to a named commercial developer, underwritten by a national export credit agency.

The UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero raised the fixed-bottom offshore wind budget pot for Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 7 (AR7) from GBP 900 million to GBP 1.79 billion ahead of results, nearly doubling the subsidy envelope. On 14 January 2026 DESNZ announced AR7 results securing a record 8.4 GW of offshore wind capacity across eight projects at a clearing strike price of approximately GBP 91/MWh (2024 prices), unlocking an estimated GBP 22 billion in private-sector investment. RWE was the largest winner with 6.9 GW (Norfolk Vanguard East/West, Dogger Bank South, Awel y Môr); SSE secured 1.4 GW via Berwick Bank Phase B at GBP 89.49/MWh.