The agreement targets a growing bottleneck in Europe’s energy system: manufacturers of transformers, cables, switchgear and other components are being asked to increase production while utilities and governments accelerate investment in transmission and distribution networks.
Under the deal, the EIB will provide up to €350 million in counter-guarantees, while BNP Paribas will commit an equivalent amount. The resulting €700 million portfolio of bank guarantees is expected to support companies investing in additional production capacity and supply contracts.
The European Investment Bank said the arrangement could stimulate as much as €2.8 billion in investment in the real economy.
The initiative is backed by the EU’s InvestEU programme and forms part of the EIB’s €1.5 billion Pan-EU Power Grid package. Guarantees are particularly important for infrastructure suppliers because large electricity projects often require manufacturers to provide financial guarantees before receiving contracts.
Those commitments can consume bank credit lines that companies might otherwise use to build factories, purchase machinery or finance working capital.
By sharing the risk with BNP Paribas, the EIB intends to increase the volume of guarantees available without requiring manufacturers to commit equivalent amounts of their own financing capacity.
The programme arrives as grid investment becomes one of the central constraints on European energy policy.
The EU is simultaneously attempting to expand renewable generation, electrify transport and industry, increase cross-border electricity trading and reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.
All require additional transmission and distribution capacity. EU Today reported earlier this year that the EIB had approved almost €2 billion for clean energy and grid projects as part of a broader €10 billion financing package.
The latest BNP Paribas agreement concentrates specifically on the industrial supply chain needed to build those networks.
Grid investment is increasingly influenced by security concerns as well as electricity demand.
EU Today reported last week that Lithuania is designing part of the Harmony Link infrastructure to withstand drones, sabotage and vehicle attacks near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Such requirements increase the cost and complexity of new electricity infrastructure while demand for conventional grid equipment is already rising.
European manufacturers face lengthy order books for some high-voltage equipment, particularly large transformers and specialised cables. Supply constraints can delay renewable projects and interconnectors even when planning permission and financing are available.
The EIB says its guarantee programme is intended to give manufacturers greater financial capacity to respond. The arrangement follows a similar partnership between the bank and BNP Paribas covering wind-energy manufacturing.
In February 2025, the two institutions agreed a €1 billion guarantee portfolio intended to support investment in the European wind industry. The EIB has subsequently expanded its focus from generation equipment to the networks required to transport electricity.
In 2025, the EIB Group invested €33 billion in energy projects worldwide, including €11.6 billion in grids and storage, according to the institution.
European energy policy has increasingly recognised that adding generating capacity without expanding grids can create congestion, delays and periods in which renewable electricity cannot reach consumers.
Political disagreements remain over how new infrastructure should be planned and financed.
In June, EU Today reported that member states had pushed back against stronger Brussels control over cross-border grid planning, preferring to preserve a significant role for national authorities.
Financing institutions are meanwhile moving ahead with programmes intended to expand the underlying industrial capacity.
For manufacturers, the EIB–BNP Paribas scheme does not provide €2.8 billion of direct public spending. Instead, public guarantees are being used to increase the volume of private financing available, with the EIB assuming part of the risk.
The distinction is central to InvestEU, which uses EU budget guarantees and EIB financing to attract additional private capital.
Europe’s electricity transition is increasingly dependent on this less visible part of the energy system. New wind farms, solar installations, nuclear reactors and industrial electrification projects ultimately require the same infrastructure: sufficient cables, substations, transformers and transmission capacity to move electricity from producers to users.
Europe is facing more immediate cyber threats, but whether its member states are prepared to deal with it collectively is becoming a question harder to answer.
Even as drone threats, such as Russia’s bomb plot at the Leipzig-Halle airport in Germany in August, dominated European headlines in September, other, less visible hybrid attacks are also being waged against the EU every day, whose sheer weight of numbers should also cause grave concern.
Poland, for instance, recorded 4,200 cyber-security incidents in military networks and systems in 2024 and 7,100 in 2025, Polish cyber command spokesperson, Przemek Lipczyński, told EUobserver.
In 2025, Polish security systems blocked four million phishing emails targeted at soldiers and defence personnel.
And Poland aside, evolving technology meant Russian cyber-attacks “do not know any border”, said Jamila Boutemeur, the EU’s head of cybersecurity body, in what amounted to a single market for hacking.
For its part, the European Union has built its cybersecurity architecture around the Boutemeur’s European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ENISA, in Athens, as well as the 27 national cybersecurity agencies.
But as Russia’s threat levels up, the European structure is seeing familiar problems: information is not always shared, responsibilities remain divided between national governments and EU institutions, while ENISA itself is being asked to do more with limited resources.
And the European Court of Auditors (ECA) confirmed it on 21 September in its ENISA study.
“The architecture is there, the structure is there. Now it’s a matter of willingness and trust,” to effectively fight back, said George-Marius Hyzler, the ECA’s main auditor.
“It always boils down to the same thing, lack of information sharing,” he said, identifying the EU’s key weakness.
And for Czech Greens MEP Markéta Gregorová, who is also the lead rapporteur on the EU’s incoming Cybersecurity Act 2 (CSA2), duplication of work also bedevilled the EU’s response.
“The [ECA] auditors describe a system that does not work” and was “wasteful”, she told EUobserver.
“Six European legal acts force the same company to report the same incident to different authorities. Two EU bodies monitor the same threats,” Gregorová said.
She also advocated a stronger operational role for ENISA.
But the EU fault lines have underlying political as well as legal tensions.
Cybersecurity remains largely within the competence of the member states, and governments differ in how much new power they are willing to delegate to European institutions.
And for Dimitar Lilkov, from the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, there were three main sources of friction: national security, trust, and money.
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