LIFE EMPOWER — Clean energy scale-up in cities
A grant for a consortium to help European cities turn proven clean-energy solutions into implementation plans, with training and local-authority roadmap grants.
Esta oportunidade está atualmente disponível em inglês.
EmpowerEUcities funds one consortium to run a support initiative for local authorities and their partners. It helps cities expand a successful local pilot or replicate a solution demonstrated elsewhere. Examples include energy sharing, community-scale storage, charging that lets electric vehicles supply electricity back to the grid, heating and cooling systems, and local electricity networks. The resulting scale-up roadmaps must show tangible financial benefits for residents and communities.
For the implementing consortium, the 2026 grant reimburses up to 95% of eligible project costs, using actual costs with some unit-cost and flat-rate elements. The Commission considers an EU contribution of up to €6 million appropriate, but permits proposals for other amounts. Infrastructure costs are excluded. Limited equipment may qualify if indispensable solely for the action, with depreciation during the project rather than its full purchase price charged.
The consortium must combine training and peer learning with later lump-sum grants to local authorities for delivering scale-up roadmaps. Those grants should account for around 70% of the proposal budget and have a maximum value of €60,000 each. The consortium must organise at least two calls, with final award criteria and the number of calls validated by CINEA. These later local-authority calls are separate from the closed 2026 application to run the initiative.
The later calls must be widely publicised, remain open for at least two months, follow rules on transparency, equal treatment, conflicts of interest and confidentiality, and have a clear European dimension. Their results must be published with selected-project descriptions, award dates, project durations and recipients’ legal names and countries.
Eligibility
For the 2026 implementing-consortium grant:
- Your consortium must be a group of at least three beneficiary applicants from three different eligible countries. Beneficiaries sign the grant agreement. Affiliated entities are organisations linked to a beneficiary that can receive part of the funding but do not sign the grant agreement; they do not count towards this minimum. Applicants must normally be public or private legal entities established in the EU, including its overseas countries and territories, or a participating LIFE country: Iceland, Moldova, North Macedonia, Montenegro or Ukraine. The coordinator must be established in an eligible country.
- Serbia’s participation in the 2026 calls is conditional: EU funding depends on successful association negotiations and an agreement covering the call. Without that, Serbian entities may participate without EU funding; exceptional funding is possible where CINEA considers their involvement essential.
- Your consortium should have strong experience in municipal energy and climate planning and investment, be able to mobilise a substantial group of cities, and reach cities across Europe. It must demonstrate expertise in local smart-energy solutions, including legal, social and financial aspects, and in running EU-compliant grant calls and monitoring grants.
- Applicants need sufficient financial resources, staff, know-how and experience to implement the project and meet their own contribution. Financial checks normally apply to coordinators, with exemptions for public bodies, international organisations and projects requesting no more than €60,000. Operational capacity is assessed through the proposal’s resources and the team’s experience.
- Individuals are excluded except self-employed sole traders whose business has no separate legal personality. International organisations can participate without the usual country-location rule. Entities without legal personality may exceptionally participate if their representatives can undertake legal obligations and provide equivalent protection for EU financial interests. Other-country entities may exceptionally receive funding if CINEA considers their participation essential. Where an association’s members implement activities, those members must participate as beneficiaries or affiliated entities for their costs to be eligible. The coordinator-location requirement remains.
- EU bodies are excluded except the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. EU restrictive measures bar participation; EU conditionality measures bar funded roles, including for Hungarian public interest trusts under Act IX of 2021 and entities they maintain. Applicants must also comply with the call’s exclusion rules, covering insolvency, tax and social-security breaches, serious misconduct and criminal offences, serious past EU funding breaches, irregularities and obstruction of EU investigations.
- Project activities must normally take place in eligible countries. Activities elsewhere require a demonstrated need to achieve EU environmental or climate objectives and make interventions in eligible countries effective. LIFE funding cannot overlap other EU funding: declare related EU funding and applications, including operating grants. The grant cannot generate a profit; for-profit organisations must declare revenues and any profit is deducted from the final grant.
For the initiative’s later local-authority roadmap grants, a local authority must be in a LIFE-eligible country and already have a politically approved Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP), or an equivalent plan. Its application must identify the solution, its technological readiness, envisaged financing and governance, explain existing planning and resources, and demonstrate substantial implementation potential. It must propose a strategy for engaging technical, financial and operational partners and citizens, and commit to monitoring implementation for at least one year. Roadmaps must cover technical, legal and financial feasibility, implementation steps, internal resources and local stakeholder roles, and be signed at executive level by the stakeholders needed for implementation.
How to apply
- Estado
- encerrado
- Abre
- Encerra
- Condições do período de candidaturas
- Closed 2026 call for the consortium implementing EmpowerEUcities; later local-authority roadmap grants use separate calls.
The 2026 intake to run EmpowerEUcities is closed. Read CINEA’s official EMPOWER call page and the 2026 call document for that round. Its deadline was 16 September 2026 at 17:00 CEST; the later local-authority grants require separate calls organised by the selected consortium.
Consortium proposals for that round had to be submitted through the Funding & Tenders Portal, using the electronic submission system’s forms and required annexes. Beneficiaries, affiliated entities and associated partners had to register in the Participant Register and obtain a participant identification code before submission; beneficiaries and affiliated entities are validated before grant signature.