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.

Integrated use of renewable energy carriers in industrial sites (Processes4Planet partnership) (RIA)

TOPIC ID: HORIZON-CL4-INDUSTRY-2025-01-TWIN-TRANSITION-33

Type of grant: Call for proposals

General information

Programme:

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

Type of action: HORIZON-RIA HORIZON Research and 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:

• Enable the integrated use of different types of renewable energy carriers in industrial sites^[1] with the aim to provide a constant robust low-carbon and economic energy input to process industries;
• Pave the way for strategic industrial cooperation to cope with fluctuations of the energy inputs and to achieve overall energy and cost efficiency;
• Support stability and operational flexibility of the power grid, including implementation of storage solutions to buffer energy demand peaks;
• Enable the use of renewable energy labelling and documentation, scheduling of energy use and price compensation models to achieve optimal grid load;
• Improve the technical and economic feasibility of the integrated use of renewable energy carriers in industrial sites compared to other solutions with a similar CO2 reduction potential.

Scope:

There is a broad range of renewable energy carriers (e.g., electricity, hydrogen, solar heat, ammonia, etc) which can be utilised in the process industries. Many of them are provided with significant temporal variations, e.g., renewable electricity and solar heat. Integrated design and operation of these highly complex systems within process industry sites are needed to cope with the fluctuations of the energy inputs and to achieve overall energy and cost efficiency. Industrial symbiosis and integration of production systems with energy systems in industrial sites can ensure overall emission reduction. These approaches can increase the efficiency of generation and enable solutions that avoid losses, supporting stability and efficiency of power systems.

Proposals under this topic should:

• Develop highly efficient technologies for, and prototype designs of, integrated structures of industrial sites, including storage elements and solutions for their integrated operation under varying conditions;
• Take due account of logistic aspects, risk assessment and management at plant level;
• Develop systemic solutions embracing industrial symbiosis, and if relevant, contribute to further evolution of existing Hubs4Circularity^[2];
• Consider the interaction with the supply side, in particular electric power grids, hydrogen pipelines or district heating;
• Demonstrate full integration and use of advanced digital technologies from fields of distributed process control strategies, and data driven AI based optimisation and the application of model-based technologies for the improved, safe and efficient operation of industrial plants and sites, including the interaction with different grids;
• Demonstrate and evaluate energy efficiency and CO2 footprint reduction by optimal integration of energy from renewable sources as well as providing demand side flexibility;
• Propose new ways to adapt the workplaces and organisation of site management to ensure that the solutions can be widely implemented.

Proposals should include energy efficiency, techno-economic and life-cycle assessment considerations of the overall process.

Proposals should consider representative real industrial sites demonstrating the solutions at least in open-loop computations. This should be done in parallel to the actual operation of the plants with validation of the benefits by simulations with accurate models. Experiments involving real industrial sites are encouraged.

Proposals should actively pursue involvement of all actors in the value chain, from industrial sites management to plant operators, and renewable energy providers. Interoperability as well as secure and trusted data sharing between stakeholders in the value chain should be considered, in accordance with the FAIR^[3] data principles. 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.

A strategy for skills development to master the challenges of such integrated systems should be included associating social partners. Attention should be given to using results from existing initiatives that have developed education and skills development concepts in this area.

This topic implements the co-programmed European partnership Processes4Planet.

[1] Industrial sites refers to industrial clusters, hubs, parks formed by several plants of the energy intensive industries. Large individual plants may be considered in those sectors where plants are not typically integrated in industrial sites.

[2] Hubs4Circularity (h4c-community.eu);Horizon Europe strategic plan 2025-2027-KI0223326ENN.pdf (page 94)

[3] Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable data

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