This week the Renovate Europe Campaign, together with E3G, published the report 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy Support for Energy Efficiency and Building Renovation.
The study looks into how EU member states plan to use cohesion policy funding to support renovation and draws attention to key actions to maximise impact. An estimated €20bn are programmed for energy renovation and energy efficiency. With co-financing from member states, this could reach €29bn. This is an important contribution to financing renovation. However, these funds alone cannot cover the investment needed to meet the 55% emissions reduction target for 2030.
In the run up to 2030, the new cohesion funds will be used alongside the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) to support the delivery of renovation investments across the EU. RRF and cohesion funding combined will provide over €66bn for energy renovation across the EU until 2029.
To achieve maximum impact of this unprecedented quantity of EU money, effort must be made to use the funds as efficiently as possible. To do so the report states that members states should focus on:
- Attracting and leveraging private finance while targeting grants where they are most needed
- Ensuring careful coordination with other (EU) public funds
- Monitoring programme implementation and address delivery bottlenecks
The report is available here.
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 
This report is absolutely right to emphasise the crucial role regarding energy efficiency improvements that purposeful allocations of cohesion funds could provide. But there have been far too many examples of funds ostensibly dedicated to this purpose being diverted away to other uses.
We will not succeed meeting our long-term objectives if this diverting of funds continues to happen.