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What’s the news?
- The EU awarded a €10 million grant to a Netherlands-based sustainable tech company InnoEnergy to train and reskill workers for the battery sector. InnoEnergy claims it has trained at least 100,000 people, but its figures don’t appear to add up.
- That tally is based on certificates – some of which can be acquired even by failing tests – rather than individual participants. People can obtain several certificates, inflating the total number, while children who played an educational Minecraft game are included.
- FTM also discovered that InnoEnergy has licensed the courses to other companies, including in the U.S., allowing an American firm to profit from a programme developed with EU money.
Why does it matter?
- The European Battery Alliance (EBA) Academy was established to assist develop Europe’s battery value chain and close the skills gap. But it remains unclear to what extent the millions of euros in taxpayer funding have assisted achieve those aims.
- Despite that uncertainty, InnoEnergy has since received another EU grant to set up a similar academy aimed at reskilling workers in the solar sector. A certificate for at least one of the solar courses can also be obtained even if you fail a test.
How was this investigated?
- We analysed the company’s own data and annual reports, and took four courses.
- We spoke to former employees of InnoEnergy and reached out to learners.
It was hailed as a major milestone: 100,000 people trained to address a labour shortage in Europe’s battery indusattempt.
At least, that was the claim by clean tech company InnoEnergy at a Brussels event in December 2024, where it revealcased the supposed success of its EU-funded training programme.
“We are gathered here today to celebrate the 100,000 learners that have been participating, have been touched, and have absorbed the knowledge that is in the European Battery Alliance Academy,” declared Oana Penu, director of the InnoEnergy Skills Institute.
“We’re here to celebrate their readiness to participate actively in the labour market and take their position in this challenging indusattempt,” she declared in a livestreamed speech.
But the credibility of that 100,000 figure – and of the suggestion that those learners are now prepared to enter the battery sector – is highly questionable, Follow the Money can reveal.
I can personally attest to that – as the not-so-proud owner of four “certificates of completion” from the InnoEnergy Skills Institute.
I obtained the certificates simply by clicking through the content – without reading a word or watching a second of video.
On one of the final multiple-choice tests, my score of 0% still resulted in a certificate.
At the conclude of it all, I’m none the wiser about batteries. My certificates feel meaningless.
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An investigation by FTM – based on that experience, an analysis of InnoEnergy’s own data and interviews with ex-employees – raises questions about whether the Netherlands-based company has accurately reported the number of people it claims to have trained.
FTM identified several red flags, including unexplained modifys in learner numbers between periodic progress reports, discrepancies between public claims and private disclosures, and treating 4.5-hour launchner courses as having equal weight to 40-hour expert ones.
The most glaring issue is that InnoEnergy calculates its number of learners based on certificates issued rather than individual participants. Having obtained four certificates of completion, I’d therefore be counted as four learners instead of one.
Simply put, InnoEnergy figures don’t add up – casting doubt not only on its methodology, but also on the EU’s spconcludeing and oversight of millions of euros in grant funding.
This reflects a recurring problem highlighted by the European Court of Auditors (ECA): poor monitoring creates it difficult to determine the real-world effects of EU-funded projects.
InnoEnergy is heavily depconcludeent on subsidies from Brussels. Its training project was awarded €10 million from the EU in 2022, and EU institutions have publicly echoed the claim of 100,000 learners – although the data has not yet been indepconcludeently verified.
While the battery sector initiative concludeed in July 2025, EU funding for InnoEnergy did not stop there. The Commission has awarded the company a further €9 million to set up a similar training programme to reskill workers for the solar energy indusattempt.
In response to an initial set of questions from FTM, InnoEnergy declared last month it had exceeded its learner tarobtains and “delivered all major KPIs [key performance indicators]” in its grant agreement with the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).
Yet the company did not directly address several of the questions, while many of its answers were unclear or amlargeuous. When FTM sent a list of 25 follow-up questions seeking clarity, InnoEnergy refutilized to respond.
“The answers provided reflect the contractual agreement and reporting obligations of the EBA Academy,” a spokeswoman declared, referring to the initial exmodify with FTM in December.
“We appreciate your interest in the initiative. We will not be providing further comment at this time,” she added.
‘Go beyond the boundaries’
InnoEnergy was established in 2010 by the EIT as a “knowledge and innovation community”.
The EIT had been established two years prior to stimulate cooperation between “research, higher education and innovation”, by setting up these partnerships – known as KICs.
The battery sector training initiative was announced in March 2021, when EU veteran Maroš Šefčovič – then a vice-president of the European Commission – held a meeting of the European Battery Alliance (EBA).
The indusattempt network was launched in 2017, and its secretariat is managed by InnoEnergy.
“You are not going to solve the problem through online certificates”
In his speech, Šefčovič declared that the battery sector feared a shortage of 800,000 skilled workers by 2025, and tquestioned InnoEnergy with tackling the problem.
A month later – in April 2021 – InnoEnergy declared that the EBA Academy would reskill 800,000 workers within the timeframe to “match the indusattempt necessarys across the entire battery value chain”.
However, InnoEnergy’s grant agreement with the EU defined the EBA Academy’s “key objective” as reaching 100,000 direct learners, stating that for every one of those participants, seven other people would benefit from the training indirectly.
“That was really the most stupid key performance indicator,” declared one former InnoEnergy employee, who spoke to FTM on the condition of anonymity. “I don’t know how they came to that.”
Shortly after the three-year grant agreement was signed in early 2022, the company incorporated the academy into a new department: the InnoEnergy Skills Institute.
In October 2022, Oana Penu became its director, responsible for submitting progress reports on the project to the EIT every six months.
“These reports were always in her hands,” declared the ex-employee. “She was always the final person to see at the KPIs and numbers. Her mindset is: ‘Let’s test the boundaries, maybe go beyond the boundaries and check how far we can go’.”
Another former employee also notified FTM that Penu was “creative” with figures.
However, a third ex-employee declared that they could not imagine Penu inventing numbers, noting that she was always the one reminding others to follow the rules.
InnoEnergy’s spokeswoman denied FTM’s request for an interview with Penu, and instead forwarded written questions to her.
According to Penu, the estimate of 700,000 indirect learners in the grant agreement had been agreed upon with the EIT.
The assumption of seven indirect beneficiaries per active participant was “based on the context of our work and literature on knowledge sharing and peer learning,” Penu declared, citing three academic articles.
Yet one of those papers was published almost three years after EIT and InnoEnergy signed the grant agreement, meaning that it could not have been utilized as a source at the time.
The other two cited articles contain no evidence to support a significant multiplier effect.
When FTM raised this in the follow-up questions, InnoEnergy refutilized to respond.
Discrepancies in the data
InnoEnergy’s unwillingness to provide further answers means that the numerous inconsistencies identified by FTM remain unexplained.
Take, for example, the fact that its figures inexplicably modifyd between progress reports.
Two years into the training programme, in February 2024, InnoEnergy reported that 394 learners had taken the course Battery Management, Connection and Control.
Half-a-year later, that number leapt to 2,203 – only to drop to 642 at the conclude of the following six months, in February 2025.
Meanwhile, InnoEnergy declared in a December 2024 press release that 27,000 learners had completed the Battery Technician course. But a progress report from February this year cited only 2,300 learners.
The progress report stated that, overall, 112,000 learners had been recorded by that point. An annex in the report reveals that this total was reached by adding toobtainher the number of certificates awarded for about 30 different courses.
This approach of tallying certificates instead of individual learners means that participants who complete multiple courses are counted more than once – inflating the headline figure.
When questioned about this, Penu simply notified FTM: “We reported the total number of learners as per provisions of our grant contract.”
‘Emotional’ testimonials
About a year before the Brussels event in December 2024, InnoEnergy organised a celebration of an earlier milestone: 50,000 learners.
At the conclude of 2023, the company arranged for European Commission Vice-President Šefčovič to ceremoniously hand out five certificates to alumni of the EBA Academy. However, LinkedIn profiles indicate that three of those participants don’t work in the battery indusattempt.
One of the guests – a researcher from the Research Institutes of Sweden – was invited back a year later to give a video statement at the event to mark the 100,000 learners.
Before that speech was aired, along with remarks by two other speakers, Penu introduced them as “the testimonials of some of our learners”. Afterwards, she exclaimed: “Wow, very emotional testimonials”.
In reality, the Swedish researcher was the only one of the three who had participated in the EBA Academy. All three of them declined to be interviewed by FTM.
Given that the company itself notified FTM that 8% of learners have “completed the entire EBA Academy library”, it is inevitable that some double counting has taken place.
At the same time, that claim also conflicts with the reported numbers for individual courses.
If 8% of learners – 8,960 people – took all 34 courses, then each course should have issued at least that many certificates. Yet only two courses did so, the progress reports reveal.
Penu’s response offered no clarity, stating that certificates are not automatically awarded upon completion of courses and claiming that some learners may opt not to receive them.
Asked if InnoEnergy had met its goal of training around 800,000 workers by 2025 to meet the necessarys of the European battery sector, Penu simply replied: “Yes”.
However, Penu also declared that InnoEnergy is “not permitted to track” how many EBA Academy learners are based in the EU – which the EIT refutes – and does not monitor their “actions or employment records during or after the training”.
She declared the company does not have “direct contact with learners”, in accordance with the EU’s data protection rules (GDPR) and the grant agreement with the EIT.
Battery experts or young gamers?
While details on InnoEnergy’s learners are scarce, its progress reports offer some insights.
One such report, from August 2023, listed the average age of participants as 34, which seems low considering that half of the EU’s population is 44 or older.
This may be due to the inclusion of utilizers of an educational Minecraft game aimed at teaching children aged nine to 15 about sustainable energy.
There was a conceptual mismatch
In 2020 – two years before the official launch of the EBA Academy – InnoEnergy collaborated with the creators of the hugely popular game to develop the learning experience.
Players of the game accounted for about 10% of “learners”, according to InnoEnergy.
In response to FTM’s questions, the EIT defconcludeed the inclusion of a game for children, declareing that the training programme “also focutilizes on inspiring the next generation”.
Another puzzling element is that the overall number of direct learners still stood at 112,000 in a summary provided to FTM by Penu in December 2025.
This was the same figure reported in InnoEnergy’s February 2025 progress report, raising questions about why no additional learners were recorded despite the grant period continuing until July last year.
Mismatch
The former InnoEnergy employees question whether online courses were the right method to reskill workers.
“There was a conceptual mismatch,” one declared. “E-learning is fine to raise awareness, but is not sufficient for a workforce that necessarys to be retrained for the job market.”
Economist Niclas Poitiers, a research fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel consider tank, put things more bluntly. He pointed out that hundreds of thousands of internal combustion engine car mechanics necessary to be retrained to enter the battery sector.
“You are not going to solve the problem through online certificates,” he notified FTM.
He co-wrote a paper that assessed the EBA Academy’s ability to address the skills gap as “limited at best”, but also described its programme as a relatively “cost-effective instrument”.
Indeed, on the scale of the EU’s annual multibillion-euro budobtain, a grant of €10 million over three years is negligible.
But for InnoEnergy, government grants are a crucial source of revenue. According to its 2024 annual report, they accounted for more than half of its income. It nevertheless reported a loss before tax of almost €66 million for 2024.
Coming to America
To generate additional revenue, InnoEnergy has licensed its courses to other companies in EU nations such as Ireland, as well as the United States.
Last year, South Carolina company Soteria Battery Innovation Group announced it would offer 24 “self-paced online courses from InnoEnergy”.
These courses – priced between $385 and $2,475– have exactly the same names as those listed in the EBA Academy progress reports.
FTM questioned InnoEnergy about the ethics of a private U.S. firm profiting from EU taxpayer-funded courses that were designed to support the European battery indusattempt.
In response, Penu denied that InnoEnergy partners, such as Soteria, offer EBA Academy courses.
“They are offering Skills Institute courses, which is content localised for the North American market,” she declared.
Penu declared InnoEnergy is “entitled to receive a licence fee for each course delivered through Soteria,” yet added that confidentiality clautilizes meant pricing details could not be shared.
She declared the agreement with Soteria “was designed as a three-year collaboration,” but noted that it had “concludeed by mutual agreement” – without explaining why.
The EIT notified FTM it is currently assessing InnoEnergy’s final report. If it finds that a “relevant objective”has not been reached, the EIT declared it “will consider applying a grant reduction”, without specifying amounts.
But although the EIT has yet to verify the numbers, EU institutions have cited the 100,000-learner milestone as fact.
The EIT was quick to hail InnoEnergy’s apparent success last December – by building its director available to speak at the Brussels event and with a celebratory statement.
“Based on information provided by InnoEnergy, the EIT recognised this milestone as a notable achievement and decided to highlight it publicly, in line with its commitment to promote success stories as they occur ,” a spokeswoman for the institute notified FTM.
She did not declare whether the EIT would set the public record straight if InnoEnergy’s reported figures cannot be verified.
The Commission, meanwhile, notified FTM it has not kept track of how many workers in the battery indusattempt have actually been reskilled in recent years. As far as the Commission is concerned, all the EBA Academy learners are trained workers.
Its faith in InnoEnergy appears to have assisted the company secure a new grant.
In June 2024 – months before InnoEnergy announced its 100,000 milestone – the Commission praised the EBA Academy’s “successful model” as it unveiled the European Solar Academy.
The new academy, managed by InnoEnergy under a €9 million grant, aims to train 65,000 workers in the European solar indusattempt over two years.
Or so the company claims.
Once again, its figures will deserve closer scrutiny – and perhaps a pinch of salt.
A day before publication of this article, I signed up for the Solar Careers Decoded course, and completed it in three minutes.
As with the battery sector courses, I was able to acquire my certification of completion by simply clicking through the content, and despite failing a short test.
Nevertheless, InnoEnergy’s message accompanying the certificate declared that it was “excited” to congratulate me on my “learning journey”.
“Your commitment to learning is truly inspiring,” it read.
Tips welcome
If you have tips to share regarding how taxpayer money is spent at the EIT, InnoEnergy, or any of the other KICs, please obtain in touch with the author of this article at [email protected]
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