Green and resilient flexible production processes (Processes4Planet partnership) (IA)

Topic updates

23 September 2025

15 September 2025
Reminder on proposal part B page limit and formatting conditions

1. Proposal part B page limit

The title, list of participants and sections 1, 2 and 3, together, should not be longer than page limit, indicated in a proposal part B template inside the Submission System. All tables, figures, references and any other element pertaining to these sections must be included as an integral part of these sections and are thus counted against this page limit.

The page limit will be applied automatically. At the end of a proposal part B template inside the Submission System you can see the structure of the actual proposal that you need to submit, please remove all instruction pages that are watermarked.

If you attempt to upload a proposal longer than the specified limit before the deadline, you will receive an automatic warning and will be advised to shorten and re-upload the proposal. After the deadline, excess pages (in over-long proposals/applications) will be automatically made invisible, and will not be taken into consideration by the experts. The proposal is a self-contained document. Experts will be instructed to ignore hyperlinks to information that is specifically designed to expand the proposal, thus circumventing the page limit.

Please, do not consider the page limit as a target! It is in your interest to keep your text as concise as possible, since experts rarely view unnecessarily long proposals in a positive light.

2.Proposal part B formatting conditions

The following formatting conditions apply (as listed in a proposal part B template inside the Submission System) and will be checked by the Agency during an admissibility check of submitted proposals.

The reference font for the body text of proposals is Times New Roman (Windows platforms), Times/Times New Roman (Apple platforms) or Nimbus Roman No. 9 L (Linux distributions).

The use of a different font for the body text is not advised and is subject to the cumulative conditions that the font is legible and that its use does not significantly shorten the representation of the proposal in number of pages compared to using the reference font (for example with a view to bypass the page limit).

The minimum font size allowed is 11 points. Standard character spacing and a minimum of single line spacing is to be used. This applies to the body text, including text in tables.

Text elements other than the body text, such as headers, foot/end notes, captions, formula's, may deviate, but must be legible.

The page size is A4, and all margins (top, bottom, left, right) should be at least 15 mm (not including any footers or headers).

Proposal part B template inside the Submission System document is tagged. Do not delete the tags; they are needed for our internal processing of information, mostly for statistical gathering. In that light, please do not move, delete, re-order, alter tags in any way, as they might create problems in our internal processing tools. Tags do not affect or influence the outcome of your application.

10 June 2025
Please note that due to a technical issue, during the first days of publication of this call, the topic page did not display the description of the corresponding destination. This problem is now solved. In addition to the information published in the topic page, you can always find a full description of destinations:

* destination 1: Achieving global leadership in climate-neutral, circular and digitised industrial and digital value chains;

* destination 2: Achieving technological leadership for Europe's open strategic autonomy in raw materials, chemicals and innovative materials;

* destination 4: Achieving open strategic autonomy in digital and emerging enabling technologies;

* destination 6: Digital and industrial technologies driving human-centric innovation,

that are relevant for the call in the Work Programme 2025 part for “Industry”. Please select from the work programme the destination relevant to your topic and take into account the description and expected impacts of that destination for the preparation of your proposal.

Green and resilient flexible production processes (Processes4Planet partnership) (IA)

TOPIC ID: HORIZON-CL4-INDUSTRY-2025-01-TWIN-TRANSITION-32

Type of grant: Call for proposals

General information

Programme:

Call: INDUSTRY (HORIZON-CL4-2025-01)

Type of action: HORIZON-IA HORIZON Innovation Actions

Type of MGA: HORIZON Action Grant Budget-Based [HORIZON-AG]

Status: Forthcoming

Deadline model: single-stage

Planned Opening Date: 22 May 2025

Deadline dates: 23 September 2025 17:00 (Brussels time)

Topic description

Expected Outcome:

Energy Intensive industries will benefit from the following outcomes:

• Increase significantly the process flexibility offering a step change in the capacity of individual production plants to promptly and frequently adapt to energy input variations over a significant range and with increased speed;
• Enable new flexible and efficient production processes, leading to economic and sustainability gains despite of volatile energy supply variations;
• Increase significantly raw material and energy efficiency while facing variations of the renewable energy input when compared to state-of-the-art industrial processes;
• Contribute to achieving EU climate neutrality objective as well as Commission recommendation of reducing EU GHG emissions by 90% by 2040 ^[1].

Scope:

Flexibility of energy intensive production processes is a necessity for the use of alternative energy carriers as the supply of energy by renewable sources is subject to significant variations and the competitive potential of energy storage is limited. The optimal use of the renewable energy supply will require processes that can perform fast transitions to allow continuous and efficient operation when the renewable energy input varies. The limiting factor addressed by the topic is the ability of the production plants to promptly change loads and throughputs in large ranges without negative consequences for the equipment, while staying energy and resource efficient. Storage options and use of several sources of renewable energy can be included, the combination (hybridation) of various decarbonisation technologies can also be considered.

Proposals under this topic should address all of the following:

• Address the redesign and modification of existing processes, including, as relevant, modifications of process steps or equipment and smart combinations of renewable energy sources, thereby improving the overall operation flexibility of the process and resulting in continuous efficient operation;
• Propose redesign and modification of plants and processes to increase their flexibility response rate (e.g., faster ramp up or ramp down) while maintaining a high energy- and resource efficiency;
• Demonstrate and evaluate material and energy efficiency gains from a holistic view of the processing plants and the energy systems as well as economic benefits by exploiting the price variations on the energy markets;
• Showcase improved performance, scalability and cost efficiency of the proposed solution through at least one realistic use case at pilot scale;
• Define necessary skills of the proposed solution, to enable their industrial implementation.

Digital tools and advanced control to support the operation and the flexibility of the processes can be elements of a solution.

The inclusion of a GHG avoidance methodology^[2] is recommended and should provide detailed description of baselines and projected reductions.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination, underlining how the proposal will serve the purpose to boost industrial decarbonisation technologies supply chain in Europe. As project output an elaborated exploitation plan should be developed, including preliminary plans for scalability, commercialisation and deployment (feasibility study, business plan and financial model) indicating possible private and public funding sources (e.g. Innovation Fund, InvestEU and cohesion policy funds). Societal- and environmental impact as well as implications for the workplace (including skills and organisational changes) should be outlined.

This topic implements the co-programmed European partnership Processes4Planet.

[1] 2040 climate target - European Commission (europa.eu)

[2] That could follow Innovation Fund methodology: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/innovfund/wp-call/2021/call-annex_c_innovfund-lsc-2021_en.pdf

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