The Commission approved the disbursement of €627 million under the Brexit Adjustment Reserve to a group of 4 Member States (Germany, Greece, Cyprus and Hungary) to compensate for the consequences of Brexit, as its mentioned in the announement of eu.

This decision will make €435 million available in 2022 and the residual €192 million by end of April 2023. Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms, Elisa Ferreira, said: “Brexit has had a negative impact on many people's lives within the EU. The Brexit Adjustment Reserve was set up and adopted in record time to help Member States mitigate the adverse economic, social and territorial consequences of Brexit. Now it is up to Member States to make the best use of the available funding to support regions, local communities, citizens and small and medium businesses to diversify their activities, keep jobs and reskill the workforce where necessary.”

This funding will help the economies of the Member States to mitigate the adverse impact of Brexit on their economies and regions through support to regions and economic sectors, small and medium sized companies, as well as job creation and protection, such as short-time work schemes, re-skilling, and training. The pre-financing amounts are spread over three years and Member States may use the funding until 31 December 2023 to cover expenses incurred and paid since 1 January 2020. With this decision, 20 Member States will soon have received the first and second instalment of their pre-financing. Brexit has had a negative impact on all Member States, but in different ways, as some Member States, regions, sectors, or local communities are more affected than others. The Brexit Adjustment Reserve of €5.4 billion has been put in place to support all Member States with a strong focus on those most affected. 

EU awards tender for world-class supercomputing in Barcelona

Parallel, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking announced that Bull SAS (Atos) won the procurement of the MareNostrum 5, a new European world-class supercomputer. MareNostrum5 will be located in the premises of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and will become accessible to European researchers and industry in 2023. It will be able to execute at least 205 petaflops or 205 million billion calculations per second, placing it in the world's top 5 supercomputers. The new system represents a total investment of over €151 million, covering system acquisition and maintenance, with 50% coming from the EU and 50% from a Spanish-led consortium. MareNostrum 5 will be specifically dedicated to strengthen European medical research through drug research, the development of vaccines, and virus spread simulations, as well as artificial intelligence and big data processing applications. It will also support traditional supercomputing applications, such as climate research, engineering, materials science, and earth sciences.

The computing power of MareNostrum 5 will complement the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking's existing supercomputers: Discoverer in Bulgaria, MeluXina in Luxembourg, Vega in Slovenia, Karolina in Czechia and – since this Monday 13 June – also LUMI in Finland. Two other EuroHPC supercomputers are also under way: LEONARDO in Italy and Deucalion in Portugal. Earlier this week, the EuroHPC announced five new hosting sites for a new generation of European supercomputers in Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland and Poland. The sites will be connected and available to serve a wide range of European users in the scientific community, as well as industry in particular small and medium businesses, and the public sector across the EU and participating countries.

Commission supports the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance to reduce EU dependency on Russian gas

Additionally, the Commission is hosting the fourth Forum of the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance. Members of the Alliance will discuss the Commission's REPowerEU Plan, which sets out a series of actions to accelerate hydrogen deployment to spur the green transition and replace Russian fossil fuels. At today's event, the ‘Electrolyser Partnership' announced in May will also be launched. It will support the commitment by industry to increase tenfold its hydrogen electrolyser manufacturing capacity by 2025. Furthermore, today the Alliance will present its report on the permitting of hydrogen installations, which will inform the ongoing Commission work to simplify procedures for renewable energy and hydrogen projects. Finally, the Alliance will collect new hydrogen projects from its members to be included into the project pipeline of the Alliance. Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans said: “Hydrogen is an essential part of Europe's future energy sovereignty. The speed of development of the European hydrogen sector shows that we can decarbonise our economy and secure our independence from Russian fossil fuels.

The hydrogen accelerator in the RePowerEU plan will steer the necessary investment to scale up European production of clean hydrogen.” Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, said: “Hydrogen enables the green transition of Europe's industry and is a driver for industrial innovation, competitiveness and resilience. The European industry is rolling out large-scale projects producing clean hydrogen and using it to decarbonise industrial processes. The European Clean Hydrogen Alliance is instrumental in this process. The Alliance facilitates partnerships and collaboration, fostering transnational investments materialising, notably, in IPCEIs, and helping create a favourable regulatory environment.” The European Clean Hydrogen Alliance was created by the Commission in 2020. It brings together more than 1600 organisations involved in deploying clean hydrogen in Europe. Its objective is to support the large-scale deployment of clean hydrogen technologies by 2030 by bringing together renewable and low-carbon hydrogen production, demand in industry, mobility and other sectors, and hydrogen transmission and distribution. 

cna