NER300: Success or Failure of Public Support for Low-emission Technologies?

The Paris Agreement of December 2015 set a very ambitious target for the global reduction of greenhouse gases. Its implementation means the need to transform the global economy, including the European one, towards the economy characterised by the neutral level of these gases emission. Such transformation will not be possible without the dynamic development of breakthrough technological innovations on a large scale, which requires significant financial support from the public sector. This support should be primarily focused on the demonstration phase of the innovation process, which frequently turns into the so-called technological death valley. Demonstration projects are not commercial products as yet, they are characterized by untested technical reliability and the risk of no demand for products manufactured using new technologies. Therefore, private investors are not entirely willing to invest in them. In 2009 the European Union, in order to avoid the death valley, launched, through the promising innovative low-emission technologies, the NER300 programme – one of the world’s largest programmes supporting the supply of low-carbon commercial technologies, as one of the components of the Emissions Trading System – ETS. This programme is the subject of the presented article. Its purpose is to provide answers to three basic questions: 1) did the programme end with a success or a failure?; 2) what external and internal reasons determined the results of the programme?; 3) should the programme become a systemic element of the EU ETS? The article presents the results of NER300 and their interpretation in the context of the programme’s objectives. The research covering the reasons which determined the results of the programme used the existing subject literature on the NER300 programme and the special report issued by the European Court of Auditors presenting these results as well as the selected European Union documents and normative acts.