2.3 gigatons - a number no one can prove and Germany has a personnel problem

There are numbers that are not measured - they are wished for. And then, at some point, everyone stops asking where they come from.

InnoEnergy presents 30 Spanish start-ups from the energy sector in Lisbon in October 2025, all looking for funding.

InnoEnergy was founded in 2010 - not as a traditional fund, but as a politically constructed system. Europe’s innovation strategy needed a structure to bring clean energy from the lab into the market. Battery technology, hydrogen, green steel, storage solutions. The headquarters ended up in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, one of the locations in Karlsruhe. That is not a footnote. It means InnoEnergy is not floating abstractly in Brussels - it is physically anchored in Germany, working with German companies, sitting at tables where funding decisions are made that move billions and shape jobs.

This system is largely financed with public funds. Around 760 million euros have flowed since its founding, allocated through the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. That places InnoEnergy exactly where political mandate and economic interest meet - a model meant to accelerate innovation, but one that needs reliable numbers to justify itself.

Link to the full report

The report claims that InnoEnergy’s portfolio will save around 2.3 gigatons of CO2 by 2030 - roughly 70 percent of the EU’s annual emissions. According to the document, this figure is based directly on data provided by the companies themselves, reporting their expected savings. The data is reviewed internally and aggregated, but without a unified, mandatory calculation method. Companies that leave the portfolio are no longer counted, while new ones are included immediately. That means the large number is not a measured effect, but a bundled projection made up of many individual assumptions.

This is where the problem begins. InnoEnergy speaks of 2.3 gigatons of CO2 saved by 2030. A scale that would equal roughly 70 percent of the EU’s annual emissions. On paper, this would be a massive contribution to climate protection - a result that would be remembered for generations. But the paper does not lie. It simply calculates what you put into it.

Our investigations shows a different picture from the one InnoEnergy presents publicly. The 2.3 gigatons are not based on an independent model, not on a scientific method that can be verified externally. They are based on the companies’ own figures. Around 160 start-ups and scale-ups in the portfolio provide their own estimates of how much CO2 they might save in the future. There are no uniform guidelines - no fixed method, no binding assumptions, no shared calculation framework. Each company calculates differently. The result is not a reliable total, but a collection of projections - almost a wish list.

A spokesperson for InnoEnergy defends this approach, for whatever reason. The technologies are too different, the markets too complex for a rigid model. Only a common timeframe until 2030 has been defined, support was available - the responsibility for the numbers lies with the companies themselves. Funding based on "I wish for numbers" - it sounds like intellectual modesty. In reality, it is the most elegant form of liability avoidance: you build the system, collect the funding - and if the numbers are wrong, it was someone else. Not bad, right?

That is not enough. It leads to an assessment with no scientific foundation. Without clear standards, it is impossible to judge whether the numbers are even comparable. When companies calculate their own impact and this is then only reviewed internally, a conflict of interest is inevitable and undermines the entire calculation. Anyone who delegates the basis of billion-euro decisions to the very companies that benefit from them has not chosen a quality standard. They have installed a conflict of interest as the standard - and called it responsibility.

InnoEnergy points out, and we were literally almost laughing out of our chairs, that extreme values were removed from the calculation. One has to ask where this would even lead. How these outliers are defined remains unclear. There is no fixed threshold, no transparent rule - only case-by-case decisions. In the end, a single company was excluded from more than a hundred datasets. One out of more than a hundred. That is not quality. That is quiet proof of how little was actually reviewed.

The uncertainty runs through all official figures. The European Commission once mentioned 1.1 gigatons, later 2.1. Let us see what comes next week. InnoEnergy itself now speaks of 2.3. How the number nearly doubled within a few years, which assumptions changed, which new companies were added - all of this remains unexplained publicly. Many individual data points remain undisclosed.

Even within the network, doubts are growing. Aquabattery has been part of the portfolio since 2024. Co-founder Emil Goosen considers such projections hardly reliable - too many variables, too many assumptions. In the end, you get a number with a huge margin of error, which may interest investors but does not reflect reality. That is not an external critic speaking. That is someone whose own projection is part of those 2.3 gigatons. SeaQurrent from the Netherlands develops systems that generate electricity from ocean currents. For SeaQurrent, specific CO2 savings were calculated. Co-founder Maurits Alberda himself expects the actual values to be lower in the end. The company’s own projection is already considered inflated when created - and still flows unchanged into the total. That has style, just in the wrong direction. A number that does not convince its own creators, and yet the money flows.

There is also a risk that becomes almost invisible in the large total. Not all companies contributing to the calculation today will still exist in 2030. Stegra recently came under such financial pressure that stabilization was only barely achieved - the Swedish company is building a green steel plant in Boden, where iron is produced using hydrogen instead of coal to reduce emissions. Hardt filed for insolvency at the beginning of March - the Dutch company based in Delft was working on a hyperloop system, high-speed capsules in near-vacuum tubes, intended as a new form of low-emission long-distance transport. In the calculations, this barely matters - projections from insolvent companies do not automatically disappear. The gigatons do not shrink with the companies. The numbers remain, the companies do not.

At the same time, other figures from InnoEnergy are also under pressure. The company claimed to have trained more than 100,000 people for the battery industry. Research cannot support the reported data. The sharpest aspect of this model is not just the lack of transparency - it is the structure that does not even need it. One person can collect as many certificates as they want and is counted as a new individual each time. Call this person Heinz Schmitt: ten online certificates, some of them as short as an afternoon - and the system does not count him as Heinz Schmitt, but ten times. It counts him as ten different people saving the battery industry.

If a certificate is not tied to a person but to a click, then the number at the end is not a statement about people. It is a statement about the system that produces it. Anyone who measures performance like this builds a mechanism that makes numbers grow - without more real impact behind them. The incentive is not training. The incentive is the number itself. And the number was apparently good enough to never be seriously questioned.

This is not a side issue. It is the second major promise of the organization - and it holds just as little as the first.

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology says the CO2 projections had no influence on funding decisions. A representative of the Commission describes the figures as a rough orientation. That is a remarkable statement about a system into which 760 million euros of public funds have flowed since its founding. If the key number was only a rough orientation - what exactly determined the decisions that have already been made?

For Germany, this is not a distant European debate. InnoEnergy is anchored in Karlsruhe, embedded in networks that steer investments and determine which technologies will have a future. If the numbers on which these decisions are based are self-generated, internally reviewed, and produced without a binding method - then it means this: industrial policy that is supposed to carry Germany into the next decade is built on a foundation no one truly knows.

2.3 gigatons. A number that quietly changes, that its own creators cannot defend, that still travels through the corridors of power - carried by the only promise that truly holds institutions together: that no one looks too closely.

This is not science. This is organized hope at the expense of the public. And Europe is paying for someone to keep calculating.

But it goes even further …

If you follow the network to its conclusion, you arrive at a constellation that explains itself. Among InnoEnergy’s shareholders are not only technology and financial partners, but also TotalEnergies, OMV, and Repsol - corporations whose core business has been built on fossil oil and gas for decades. That means the very companies that stand to lose the most from a climate-friendly transformation are sitting at the table - and at the same time helping decide how that transformation is shaped, which technologies are funded, which numbers are communicated. This is not a coincidence in the lineup. It is the architecture of a system that does not prevent conflicts of interest - it builds them in before the first euro is spent.

Energy policy in Germany has a personnel problem - or more precisely, a problem that it is still in office. Katherina Reiche comes from the energy sector and now sits as a minister at the levers that regulate, fund, and shape that same industry. She sets the political framework that supports this system. At the same time, companies, investors, and structures like InnoEnergy operate in the same environment, with the same networks, the same interests. Jackpot. What emerges is not a conspiracy - it does not need to be. It is enough that the same people sit at the same tables, speak the same language, and treat the same goals as self-evident. The most dangerous form of entanglement does not need dark rooms or envelopes. It only needs people who have breathed the same interests for so long that they no longer know whose air they are inhaling.

To be continued .....