925 million euros of Horizon Europe money is going into battery research between 2021 and 2027, and Fabrice Stassin is quick to say that he has no vote on where a single euro of it lands.
His organisation decides what the money is pointed at, which is a different job. Proposals go to the European Commission, not to BEPA. "We are just telling the EU where the priorities should be," he says. "We are not having a stand in choosing the projects that are receiving the funding."
Before any of that, he wants two acronyms kept apart. The partnership itself, Bat4EU, is the instrument the Commission set up to channel funding into the battery sector. When the Commission builds an instrument of that kind, it asks for a legal entity to co-manage it, and BEPA is that entity, in existence since June 2021. Two sides of the same coin, as he describes it.
The remit stops well short of the factory. BEPA works on innovation, not industrialisation, moving technologies from the lab towards the market. Stassin does not pretend research can be sealed off from industrial policy, but the money he directs is research money.
Sodium-ion, manganese and what moved in the 2024 agenda
Every two years the Commission publishes a work programme of priorities, and calls open against them. Research organisations, industrial players and startups then team up to push a specific technology closer to market. 2024 being an election year in Europe, the programme published this year covers 2025.
Where those priorities come from is the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda. BEPA published its first in September 2021 and a replacement in February 2024, and Stassin treats the distance between the two documents as a record of how fast the field has moved.
Design-to-cost chemistries appear in the new one. Sodium-ion and LFP get more attention, including variations that integrate manganese. Solid state stays on the list as something Europe still has to do more on, a technology for 2030 and beyond. Recycling processes have to be adapted to comply with the high recovery targets set in the battery regulation. He attributes the shifts to policies published since 2021 and to technological pressure from the United States, China, Japan and South Korea.
The document was not drafted by five people in a room in Brussels. Hundreds of people from industry, research organisations and universities went through a consultation, some committed to one technology and some to another. What emerges from that he calls a balance of forces, or the Belgian compromise.
He does not claim it is right. In a year or two, he says, he may be back to admit what was missed.
Excellent proposals are losing to other excellent proposals
Once a proposal is submitted through the electronic portal it reaches independent expert groups, who rate it against a criteria list and then meet to agree a consensus note. A high enough note gives a chance of funding. A low one works like school. CINEA, an agency of the Commission, then follows the funded projects and checks that the promised deliverables arrive. Stassin calls the machinery extremely well organised.
What frustrates him is the arithmetic behind it. Every call produces proposals that are genuinely excellent and get nothing, because competition is that strong. In a global race, he does not think Europe can afford to overlook good ideas. What he wants from the next framework programme, which starts after 2027, is enough capacity to cover as many as possible rather than leaving them on the side of the road.
This is the first battery partnership, not the second or third edition, so a lot of time has gone into building something that works and the next one will not start from scratch.
His phrase for the shape of the problem is a sprint and a marathon. A sprint because the technologies are developing very fast. A marathon because electrification is only beginning, and he does not think the finishing line is anywhere near.
What comes after the research stage is the question he thinks Europe answers less well. The 3 billion euros earmarked for batteries in the Innovation Fund sits after the R&D track rather than beside it: research takes a technology to a certain readiness level, which he frames as de-risking, while the Innovation Fund demonstrates it at deployment scale and generates production capacity for European autonomy. The Fund itself is not new; the battery earmark is. Two mechanisms were still on the table at the time of recording, the regular approach based on the greenhouse gas emissions a project displaces, or an auction along the lines of the hydrogen bank, with a call expected in September 2024. On whether 3 billion is enough, he notes that the scope is quite different from what is available across the Atlantic, and that it is a good start. Where member states still have generous budgets, the equivalent instrument is an IPCEI.
He also wants the research side opened outward. South Korea has decided to step into Horizon Europe, which makes a European team working with a Korean team possible, Canada is already in place, and he hopes Japan follows. The US is not in the programme, but membership is not a precondition for joint activity.
Technology risk is an argument for more money, not less
The cuts to German research funding produce the sharpest thing he says about policy.
Start and stop is the worst pattern Europe can adopt if it wants to catch up with global players: fund research, then fund industry, then fund research again. His formulation is that this is not an either/or. Research and industrialisation, together. That needs more resources, which he does not dodge, but it depends on the ambitions.
The people he speaks to in Germany do not know how they will cope. PhDs that will not be started means talent that will not be trained there, if it is trained at all. Technology options will go unassessed because nothing funds them. BEPA expects to see more German research organisations and companies in the 2025 calls, on the logic that if the money is not at home the place to go is Brussels.
Stassin is a researcher by training and does not find research risk frightening, but he thinks the standard reaction to it is backwards. High technology risk means more options have to be tried, and every option carries a cost. Solid state is his example: a great deal of research, a lot of promise, and a date that is 2030 every year and moves a little every year, precisely because so many technological combinations have to be assessed before anyone arrives at the right product. Limited funding means not everything gets tested, and the fewer options tested, the lower the chance that one turns out promising.
His conclusion is that the alternatives have run out. Europe cannot cut the cost of its energy or the cost of its labour. What is left is being smart, and that means innovation.
Talent sits in the same argument. Given the attention paid to critical raw materials, Stassin suggests it may itself be one: a country can be sitting on all the nickel, cobalt and lithium it wants and still be stuck without engineers and scientists. Unlike nickel, it cannot be ordered by the tonne. Training takes years, so anything started now has no effect before roughly 2030.
His diagnosis is that science has poor visibility in European education, and he contrasts that with the number of engineers and chemistry PhDs China trains. The structural version of the problem is the silo. Universities are still organised by faculty much as they were when he did his PhD, so people study chemistry, or physics, or engineering, while batteries draw in electronics through the BMS, mining, metallurgical science, solid-state physics and chemistry at once. Competing globally, he argues, means being innovative about how education is structured.
The Inflation Reduction Act moved factories, not research
On BEPA's own work, Stassin's assessment of the Inflation Reduction Act is that it had basically no real impact, because the Act is about attracting industrial capacity to the US rather than technological capability. He concedes that is a bit black and white.
Industrially it is a different story, and even there he is measured. Some investments that were supposed to be made in Europe are moving to the US, but he does not think that changes the end goal, because the European market will always be the European market and will need supplying at some point. What has been reshuffled is the order in which the investments happen.
The more interesting effect was on Europe itself. Europe is usually good when there is a crisis, he says, so any crisis is a motor of change. The response included the temporary crisis and transition framework, which let member states try to compensate for or match investments heading to the US. Northvolt received that kind of funding to stay active in Europe, and other companies have received a lot of support through state aid.
His objection is to whose money it is. All of it comes from member states, and the EU layer is missing. A startup in a country with no such framework has worse prospects than the same startup in Germany, which he does not think is fair in what is supposed to be a single market. Direct comparison with the Inflation Reduction Act is awkward, since the American version leans heavily on tax and tax is not an EU competency. The Innovation Fund, whether by auction or regular grant, is where he thinks the European answer starts.
Why a large company lends out its secretary general
Stassin is not a full-time secretary general. He has been at Umicore for close to fifteen years, roughly ten in government affairs, and the company makes him available to BEPA for a three-year mandate covering 2024 to 2026, timing that lines up with preparing the next partnership. His own training is in polymer science and organic chemistry, materials science rather than batteries.
What he did at Umicore he calls technology and innovation advocacy: making sure the priorities of industry end up in the documents that determine where money is spent. Umicore supported the creation of the European Battery Alliance from the start, in 2018, and the Commission's strategic action plan published that year contained a couple of lines about creating a battery partnership and getting enough R&D funding to batteries. The blueprint was there, in his words. The job was making sure it happened.
Which explains why a company gives up a senior person for three years. Big companies are not in a partnership like this for the money, he says, because the R&D budget of a big company is sometimes the size of the partnership itself. They are in it so that the research base exists on their doorstep. A company that goes looking in Europe for a strong team working on sodium wants to find there are many, and the way to get there is public money on the right topics. If nobody spends the time building that, the outcome is the one he describes flatly: "one day you open the door and there's no one."
The teams that are best, he adds, could not have become the best without public funding to get them there.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.