What changed between the plenary report and the adopted text

(66a) One of the aims of the Academies should be to contribute to the Union’s re-industrialisation and decarbonisation as well as to its open strategic autonomy. The Academies should also address the need for net zero technologies with high social and climate standards that are produced in the Union. The Academies should be established by 31 December 2024 and should provide learning content in as many of the languages of the Union institutions as possible, with the aim of achieving geographical balance across Member States. By 31 December 2025, they should start disseminating initial learning content to relevant education and training providers in Member States, such as universities, research universities, universities of applied sciences and university alliances, undertakings that provide such education and training, including SMEs, start-ups and social enterprises, social partners and by training trainers. The Academies should aim to enable the training and education of 100 000 learners each within three years of their establishment, taking the extent of the identified skills shortages into account which may result in a variation of the number of learners per Academy. The Academies should contribute to the availability of skills required for the net-zero technologies, including in SMEs. The learning content should take into account already existing learning programmes developed in the framework of the local Pact for Skills and the centres of professional excellence and should target all levels of education and qualification and all workers, including apprentices, along the value chain in the sectors concerned whereby all successive industrial phases are taken into account, from the design of the product (or the service), to the manufacturing phase, including the recycling and reuse of materials, whereby all the different professions across the value chain are considered. That content should also include learning modules with relevant information about health and safety at work for each specific technology as well as general relevant information on workers’ rights and working conditions, including on working time and workers’ rights to information and consultation. That content could, where relevant, be further adjusted to national law, applicable collective agreements and territorial and sectoral specificities by the education and training providers. The learning content should also target employees in national and local administrations (particularly responsible for permitting, impact assessment and regulations of new technologies), thus contributing to capacity building among national administrations and to a reduction of disparities among Member States.

(66b) Member States should use and deploy the learning content developed by the Academies in existing instruments such as in the reinforced Youth Guarantee whose one of its objectives is to provide education and training to NEETs, and in existing mentoring programmes. To ensure skills transparency and portability and the mobility of workers, and support the Member States in these efforts, the Academies will develop and deploy credentials, including micro-credentials, covering learning achievements. They should be issued in the format of European credentials for learning and could be integrated into the EUROPASS and, where relevant, included in National Qualifications Frameworks. Member States should be encouraged to use the content developed by the Academies for supporting the continuous reskilling and upskilling and the relevant education and training providers in their territories through national programmes and Union funding, including from the European Social Fund Plus, the reinforced Youth Guarantee, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, InvestEU the European Regional Development Fund, the Just Transition Mechanism, the Modernisation Fund and the Technical Support Instrument, and to support the integration of women in line with the European Strategy for Gender Equality in order to address educational and occupational gender stereotypes. The European network of employment services can play a significant role in using the learning content of training programmes delivered by the skills Academies in the creation and deployment of European occupation profiles and by providing information to national employment services about them.

(66c) The Net-Zero Europe Platform should assist in guiding the work of the Academies ensuring that their content addresses the skills shortages identified by the mapping exercise and providing oversight. Member States should ensure that the appointed national representative can act as a bridge between the relevant national ministries and competent authorities of the Member States as well as the national social partners and industry representatives. The Net-Zero Europe Platform should collect information on the progress made by the different Academies and produce by the end of 2026 an overview report on the deployment of the learning programmes, including the number of learners benefiting from the Academies’ programmes disaggregated by industrial sectors, gender, age, and levels of education and qualification.

(67) While in the absence of specific provisions introducing minimum training requirements for the access to a regulated profession or the pursuit thereof laid down in the Union law, it is a Member State’s competence to decide whether and how to regulate a profession, national rules organizing access to regulated professions must not constitute an unjustified or disproportionate obstacle to the exercise of those fundamental rights. The competence to regulate access to a profession must be exercised within the limits of the principles of non-discrimination and proportionality, in accordance with Directive (EU) 2018/958 of the European Parliament and of the Council ▌. In their assessment Member States should take into account any detrimental effects that regulation or professions may have on the availability of skills in the Net-Zero Industry and seek to limit the regulation in these fields to the maximum extent possible.

(68) Where the learning programmes developed by ▌Academies lead to credentials that would be of assistance including to persons seeking access to a profession that is regulated, Member States and employers should, in order to facilitate the mobility in strategic net-zero industry professions, accept these credentials as sufficient proof of the knowledge, skills and competences to which they attest.

(68a) The contribution of net-zero technologies to the decarbonisation objectives of the Union can materialise only when those technologies are deployed. Such a deployment, to an extent, is likely to happen in private households, but most decarbonisation is likely to come from decarbonising industrial processes. In order to ensure that investments for such decarbonisation take place in the Union, which is essential to secure good jobs and prosperity in the Union as well as for fulfilling the Union's decarbonisation objectives, it is crucial that it contributes to an improvement of the investment climate for industry in the Union.

(a) support the Union’s climate targets and climate neutrality objective, as defined by Regulation (EU) 2021/1119;

(b) foster the Union’s international industrial competitiveness in order to contribute to the creation of quality jobs;

(c) improve the Union’s access to a secure and sustainable supply of net-zero technologies;

(d) strengthen Union’s open strategic autonomy;

(e) safeguard the resilience of the corresponding Union’s supply chains; and

(f) achieve the decarbonisation of the Union’s economy and society.

2. To achieve the general objective referred to in paragraph 1, this Regulation contains measures with a view to ensuring:

(ba) ‘materials’ means any raw or processed materials needed for the production of a component of a net-zero technology or of the final product;

(c) ‘innovative net-zero technologies’ means technologies that comprise a genuine innovation, which are currently not available on the internal market and improve on the dominant comparable net-zero technology in at least one way as well as any technology included in the Strategic Energy Technology Plan referred to in Article 26d;

(ca) 'other innovative technologies’ means technologies with potential to enable the transition to a climate neutral, clean economy and reduce strategic dependencies, which comprise genuine innovation not currently available on the internal market and which are advanced enough to be tested in a controlled environment;

(cb) ‘pre-commercial innovative net-zero technologies’ means innovative net-zero technologies that are not commercially available but that are advanced enough to be tested in a controlled environment;

(cc) ‘new commercial net-zero technologies’ means net-zero technologies which are not yet available on a large-scale commercial basis, which have a low market share, which improve on the dominant comparable technologies in at least one way, and which carry a clear degree of risk when included in a procurement;

(cd) 'pre-commercial procurement' means the procurement of pre-commercial innovative net-zero technologies involving risk-benefit sharing under market conditions, and competitive development in phases, where there is a clear separation between the development activities of the procured products and the deployment of commercial volumes of the end-products;

(ce) 'public procurement of innovative solutions' means procurement for which contracting authorities act as a launch customer for commercial innovative net-zero technologies, which may include conformity testing;

(d) ‘net-zero technology manufacturing project’ means a planned industrial facility or extension or repurposing of an existing facility for manufacturing of net-zero technologies, final products or components, materials or machinery along the supply chains of those technologies that are indispensable for their production and functioning;

(e) ‘net-zero strategic project’ means a net-zero technology manufacturing project which is selected in accordance with criteria laid down in Article 10;

(ea) ‘net-zero industry valley’ or ‘Valley’ means a specific land area which has been designated by a Member State for the purpose of promoting the construction or expansion of manufacturing facilities in the net-zero industry supply chain;

(f) ‘permit granting process’ means a process covering all relevant administrative permits to plan, build, expand and operate net-zero technology manufacturing projects, such as net-zero strategic projects, including building, chemical and grid connection permits and environmental assessments and authorisations where these are required, and encompassing all administrative applications and procedures from the receipt of the ▌application to the designated authority until the notification of the comprehensive decision on the outcome of the procedure by the responsible national competent authority or, where relevant, a responsible grid operator;

(g) ‘comprehensive decision’ means the decision or set of decisions taken by Member State authorities not including courts or tribunals that determines whether or not a project promoter is authorised to implement a net-zero technology manufacturing project, without prejudice to any decision taken in the context of an administrative appeal procedure;

(h) ‘project promoter’ means any undertaking or consortium of undertakings developing a net-zero technology manufacturing project or a net-zero strategic project;

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(ia) ‘net-zero regulatory sandbox’ means a scheme that enables undertakings to test innovative net-zero technologies and other innovative technologies in a controlled real-world environment, under a specific plan, developed and monitored by a competent authority;

(l) ‘public procurement procedure’ means any of the following:

(i) any type of award procedure covered by Directive 2014/24/EU for the conclusion of a public contract or Directive 2014/25/EU for the conclusion of a supply, works and service contract;

(ii) a procedure for the award of works or a service concession covered by Directive 2014/23/EU;

(m) ‘contracting authority’ in the context of public procurement procedures, means contracting authority as defined in Article 6 of Directive 2014/23/EU, Article 2(1), point (1) of Directive 2014/24/EU and Article 3 of Directive 2014/25/EU;

(n) ‘contracting entity’ in the context of public procurement procedures, means contracting entity as defined in, Article 7 of Directive 2014/23/EU and Article 4 of Directive 2014/25/EU;

(o) ‘contract’, in the context of public procurement procedures, means a public contract as defined in Article 2(1), point (5) of Directive 2014/24/EU, ‘contracts’ as defined in ‘supply, works and service contracts’ as defined in Article 2, point (1), of Directive 2014/25/EU, and ‘concessions’ as defined in Article 5, point (1), of Directive 2014/23/EU;

(p) ‘auction’ means a mechanism for competitive tendering procedures, not falling under the definition of ‘concessions’ according to Article 5, point (1), of Directive 2014/23/EU;

(q) ‘CO2 injection capacity’ means the annual amount of CO2 that can be injected in an operational geological storage site, permitted under Directive 2009/31/EC, including saline aquifers, provided with the means of capturing CO² and transporting it to the site, and with the purpose to reduce emissions or increase carbon removals, in particular from large scale industrial installations and which is measured in tonnes per annum;

(qa) ‘CO2 transport networks’ means multimodal CO2 transport infrastructure, including the network of pipelines, including associated booster stations, for the transport of CO2 to the storage site;

(r) ‘energy system integration’ means solutions for the planning and operating of the energy system as a whole, across multiple energy carriers, infrastructures, and consumption sectors, by creating stronger links between them with the objective of delivering fossil-free, reliable and resource-efficient energy services, at the least possible cost for society.

(s) ‘manufacturing capacity’ means the total amount of output capacity of the net-zero technologies produced in a manufacturing project. If the manufacturing project does not produce final products but specific components or specific machinery primarily used for the production of such products, then manufacturing capacity refers to output capacity of the final product that would use such components or specific machinery to be produced.