EU Backs €126 Million Cross-Border Drive to Link Germany, Poland and the Baltics on Renewables

The European Commission has approved close to €126 million in grants for three renewable energy projects that share one requirement: none of them could exist without a formal cooperation agreement between two EU member states. Announced on Thursday under the Connecting Europe Facility's cross-border renewables strand, the funding round backs two district heating schemes straddling the German-Polish border and an onshore wind park spanning Latvia and Lithuania — a small but concrete illustration of how the EU is trying to knit its energy transition together at the seams where national grids and heating networks currently stop.

The largest single award, about €70 million, goes to Görlitz and Zgorzelec, twin towns split by the Neisse river that already share a market square and, soon, a heating system. The grant will fund a "climate-neutral" district heating network built jointly across the border, replacing what has historically been two separate, fossil-dependent local systems with one shared low-carbon network — the kind of infrastructure that rarely gets built without EU money forcing the cross-border paperwork into existence.

A second, smaller German-Polish award of more than €11 million targets a less glamorous but arguably harder problem: taking coal-fired heating out of a working town. In Słubice, on the Polish side, the funding will replace coal-fired units with biomass boilers burning organic material such as wood, while on the German side in Frankfurt (Oder), it begins what the Commission calls the "deep decarbonisation" of the town's existing district heating network. Together, the Görlitz–Zgorzelec and Słubice–Frankfurt projects point to a specific EU strategy: use cross-border grant money to decarbonise district heating in twin towns that share infrastructure but sit on opposite sides of a national border.

The third project moves from heat to electricity. More than €44 million has been allocated to an onshore wind park straddling the Latvia-Lithuania border, expected to comprise around 30 turbines generating up to 680 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year once complete — the Commission notes that a single gigawatt-hour covers the annual electricity use of several hundred typical EU households, giving a sense of scale to a project still years from its first turbine.

The wind project also lands at a symbolically useful moment. Latvia and Lithuania, together with Estonia, desynchronised their electricity grids from Russia's system and joined the continental European grid in 2025, ending a decades-old dependency inherited from the Soviet era. A jointly built wind park straddling their shared border fits neatly into that broader shift: renewable capacity that reinforces regional energy security as much as it cuts emissions, at a time when the three Baltic states have made grid independence a strategic priority in its own right.

None of the three projects qualified for funding on cost or capacity alone. Under the Connecting Europe Facility's rules for cross-border renewables, applicants must show a formal cooperation arrangement between the countries involved and demonstrate that building jointly produces real net benefits — lower costs, shared capacity, or emissions cuts — that neither country could achieve alone. That bar is deliberate: the EU has committed to a binding target of 42.5% renewables in final energy consumption by 2030, with a further 2.5% aspirational, under its revised Renewable Energy Directive, and Brussels sees cross-border projects as a way of squeezing out efficiencies that purely domestic ones cannot. The Commission has already flagged its next call for cross-border renewable energy proposals for November 2026 — meaning this week's three grants are a down payment, not a one-off.

Why it matters

This is a small grant round by EU budget standards, but it's a useful stress test of the EU's actual strategy for hitting its 42.5% renewables target: build the infrastructure jointly where borders currently split it apart, and require cooperation as a condition of the money rather than a nice-to-have. Görlitz and Zgorzelec, or Słubice and Frankfurt, are the unglamorous proof points — twin towns finally getting to share one clean heating system instead of two dirty ones. If this model works, expect Brussels to lean on it harder in November's next funding round.