Structuring a €71.7m industrial programme in Southern Italy

The structure

€30.0m non-repayable, €29.7m as a zero-interest loan, and €12.0m of equity, against an eligible cost base of €64.1m. Three instruments in one programme, each with its own eligibility rules, and an aid intensity that has to reconcile across all of them.

The build case is one eight-reactor module plus a €35m R&D programme, with modules two and three following. That phasing is a funding decision as much as an engineering one: the R&D intensities and the deployment intensity are different, and how the programme is split between them changes what the whole thing is worth.

The arithmetic that decides everything

The aid intensity is the case. GBER Article 41 for renewable deployment, the R&D intensities at 65% and 40%, and the regional top-up available in the Mezzogiorno. Get the classification right and the entitlement justifies the maximum; get it wrong and the programme does not clear its own cost of capital.

That work produced a pressure-test of the official position rather than an assertion of it — including flagging, in writing, that the renewable-hydrogen classification route was not yet settled and that the modelled intensity was a working figure. A funding file that hides its open questions from its own client is a file that fails at assessment.

Alongside it: a financial model rebuilt through four revisions with a four-round numeric recheck, an assumptions register recording where every figure came from, and both official Invitalia questionnaires — business and financial — populated from the model so the two cannot drift.

Institutional work is part of the file

Regional engagement with Regione Puglia was led directly, in Italian, including a technical relazione and the follow-up when the Region redirected the project's category rather than rejecting it — out of the hydrogen-valley framing and towards advanced biofuels, carbon removals and circular economy.

That redirection was worth more than an approval-shaped answer would have been. It changed the evidence the project needed to produce, surfaced the permitting scope early, and opened a STEP-compatibility route towards a regional co-funding top-up.

What honest looks like here

The carbon balance was re-based when the original figures turned out to use the wrong national grid factor — a Singapore grid assumption applied to an Italian plant. Correcting it lowered the headline and widened the band, and the number that survives is the one that can be defended in front of an assessor rather than the one that reads better.

A funding adviser who never revises a number downwards is not being careful with your file.