With all the farewell interviews, political obituaries, and reviews of the “Merkel years” that could be read, seen, and heard in recent months, one could almost feel that the Chancellor’s long-announced departure was permanent. But now Angela Merkel is really leaving. Yesterday, the German Armed Forces said goodbye with a Great Taps. At the Chancellor’s request, the staff music corps played, among others, the Nina Hagen song “Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen” and “Für mich soll’s rote Rosen regnen” by Hildegard Knef. Merkel followed the ceremony visibly moved.
There were also political farewells in Germany’s southern neighbor. In Austria, however, things were less thoughtful: after former chancellor and ÖVP party leader Sebastian Kurz announced in the morning that he was turning his back on politics, his fellow campaigners followed suit. First, acting Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg announced his resignation, a short time later Finance Minister Gernot Blümel followed suit. “I have decided to leave politics,” said Blümel, who is considered a close confidant of Kurz. The Kurz system was considered extremely stable until recently, but now it is crumbling. According to media reports citing government circles, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) is to take over the post of chancellor.
The process by which the Data Governance Act passed was rather peaceful. Now the next project is on the agenda. With the Data Act, the EU wants to promote the exchange of data and at the same time create clearer rules for data use. The potential for conflict is greater, writes Falk Steiner, capturing reactions from the business community.
In mid-December, the legislative texts with which the EU Commission wants to orient the European gas market towards hydrogen are to be presented. First drafts are already circulating and show that the focus is clearly on low-carbon fuels – such as blue hydrogen. But this is only supposedly climate-friendly, as Timo Landenberger analyses. One critic wants to recognize the “signature of the gas lobby” in the drafts.
Europe’s data rights strategy must meet several requirements at once: On the one hand, it must guarantee the protection of European values, on the other hand, it must ensure the functioning of the markets, and thirdly, it is a geopolitical lever. The protection of personal data, primarily known under the heading of the General Data Protection Regulation, has set the style: The EU can obviously set standards so that the rest of the world has to follow them.
But since the debate about whether data is the new oil, two other aspects have also come increasingly into focus: Data as the basis of power, especially market power, and data as the raw material for economic prosperity.
With the Data Governance Act, the EU has now given itself a legal framework to promote this prosperity: It lays down the essential rules on how supply and demand are to be brought together via intermediary institutions, the data exchanges of the future – and, if possible, without encouraging the formation of new monopolies.
And the geopolitical dimension is also taken into account: the DGA contains rules under which conditions data may be transferred to third countries. Admittedly, these rules are not quite as strict as those of the General Data Protection Regulation, since data relating to individuals is already subject to the GDPR rules. However, the inspiration and intention here are hard to miss: If you want to work with Europe, you have to accept Europe’s rules.
However, the regulation that will now follow and build on the DGA could be particularly important for the actual emergence of the European data market: the Data Act. On one hand, the EU wants to use this to promote the exchange of data between various participants, especially between companies, but also the state should share data and use it itself. On the other hand, the Data Act is also intended to create clearer rules for the use of data. The business community is divided or even undecided on this project.
“The data law is important for us because it should also include machine data: Industry 4.0, networked factories, and digital business models are based on data exchange,” the German Engineering Federation (VDMA), for example, informs us. “A law that seeks to regulate this data exchange must be designed with the utmost caution if there are to be no setbacks for the digitization of industry.” The approach of horizontal regulation harbors many problems, especially if very different players and industries are subjected to common standards.
There is no clearly regulated right of ownership to data – and no such right is planned with the Data Act. In contrast to personal data, the question of who may dispose of other types of data is therefore highly controversial. For example, should the owner of a car be allowed to dispose of sensor data, the car manufacturer, the manufacturer of the sensor, the supplier of the assembly, or the supplier whose operating system is installed on this end device – and whose software has read it out? Who may make this data available to whom and under what conditions? Is the owner allowed to grant access to a workshop of his choice? Or would there have to be shared rights of disposal between the parties involved?
At the same time, however, those involved in the mass generation and use of real data are in many cases not private individuals, but entrepreneurs. And they are basically free to structure their contractual relationships, regardless of market power, as long as this is not abused. The VDMA, for example, warns: “In the case of industrial data, the data sovereignty of companies must be strengthened above all, and investments in data generation and use must be protected. Consumer protection standards have their value, but should not be mixed up with the B2B sector.
The EU Commission is currently taking preventive action against such fears of overregulation through the Data Act: ” No one is being forced to share data. It’s about making data usable,” said Christiane Canenbley, deputy head of cabinet of Commission Vice-President Margarethe Vestager, at an event in Brussels on Thursday. “We can only really get the data economy moving forward if we have clear rules under which small and medium enterprises have good opportunities and a good legislative framework.”
In fact, more and more industries are confronted with the problem. Craftsmen are just as dependent on the manufacturers of their tools as construction companies are on the use of data, which is to play an increasingly strong role in the context of standardized construction via Building Information Modelling in order to build more efficiently, faster and more cost-effectively. And in the case of farmers, access to data is already a massively contentious issue, which is also occupying the new traffic light government in the coalition agreement. The threat of dependence on individual suppliers has been a recurring theme there for years.
Other players, however, warn against focusing too much on data generation and thus on the data producers: “A large data set alone does not create added value,” says Sabrina Caroli from the industry association Bitkom, in which the IT companies are organized. Only the targeted evaluation can tap the potential of the data. However, the evaluation is not likely to be the subject of the Data Act – but in many cases will take place within the framework of the AI Regulation.
In fact, it is already becoming apparent that the fragile interplay of the digital legislative initiatives consisting of the GDPR, DMA, DGA, DSA, AIA and, in the future, the Data Act will remain problematic. For political reasons, the latter should not touch on major problems in order not to jeopardize its adoption. The EU Commission’s proposal for this set of rules has meanwhile been postponed until the beginning of 2022. However, sectoral regulations, for example for the automotive sector, are already in the works, whose relationship to the Data Act is not least to create facts well in advance of its possible adoption.
Meanwhile, CSU MEP Markus Ferber hopes that the interlocking digital laws will eventually settle into a cozy coexistence: “I have a great amount of optimism that we won’t invent something new again now, but that overall this will fit into the set of rules we started in the area of digitalization.”
Green hydrogen is supposed to do the trick. Produced by means of electrolysis processes on the basis of regenerative electricity sources, the gas is to become the climate-neutral energy source of the future for all those sectors that cannot be electrified or can only be electrified with difficulty. These include the steel and cement industries, but also parts of the transport sector.
The European Commission is trying by all means to accelerate the market ramp-up. At the European Hydrogen Week, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced her intention to increase the production of green hydrogen in the EU to ten million tons per year by 2030. According to a study by the Aurora Research Institute (ARI), electrolysis projects with a total capacity of more than 200 GW are planned worldwide by 2040. 85 percent of these are in Europe and 23 percent in Germany alone.
Yet, there is still a long way to go. Most of these projects are still at an early concept stage and are not economically viable. According to ARI, hydrogen electrolyzers with a total capacity of 0.2 GW, one-thousandth of what is planned, are currently in operation worldwide. In the EU, hydrogen accounts for about two percent of the energy mix. Over 90 percent of this is generated by fossil fuels. In addition, the expansion of renewable energies is rather sluggish and must be massively accelerated in view of the increasing demand for electricity in order to be available in sufficient quantities for the production of green hydrogen.
The much-awaited alternative: blue hydrogen. This is produced from natural gas, but the carbon dioxide produced in the process is captured from the air and stored (carbon capture and storage, CCS). With a new legislative package, the EU Commission wants to orient the European gas market towards hydrogen. The corresponding legislation is to be presented on December 14th.
First drafts have already been circulating since last week and put a clear focus on low-carbon fuels such as blue hydrogen. This could play an important role in the energy transition, “especially in the short and medium-term, to rapidly reduce emissions from existing fuels and support the introduction of renewable fuels such as renewable hydrogen,” the draft states.
In addition, an EU-wide certification system is to be introduced that also covers low-carbon fuels. This would allow member states to compare different decarbonization options and consider them as viable solutions in their energy mixes. To ensure that low-carbon fuels have the same impact as other renewable alternatives, the use of a “similar methodological approach based on a life-cycle assessment of total greenhouse gas emissions” is important in the certification process.
The Commission intends to set out the exact criteria for certification in a delegated act. However, the draft gas market directive states that low-carbon hydrogen is “hydrogen whose energy content comes from non-renewable sources and which complies with a greenhouse gas emission reduction threshold of [70 percent].”
The figure is based on the EU taxonomy and is still up for discussion. “The percentages will be discussed, but this is a good basis for negotiations,” says Markus Pieper, industrial policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU in the EU Parliament. “The fact that the Commission is even thinking in the direction of making low-carbon solutions possible and allowing them as transitions is already a very good sign.”
According to a study by the think tank Agora Energiewende, CO2 storage of up to 98 percent would be possible with the production of blue hydrogen. However, this figure is already considered optimistic. CCS technologies have hardly been tested yet and critics of the technology doubt that the capture and storage of CO2 can actually keep the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere permanently. Agora is therefore calling for strict standards for the storage sites and regular monitoring and review.
But even with a CO2 capture rate of 98 percent, blue hydrogen would be anything but low-emission. At least not when the entire value chain is taken into account. This is because the natural gas required for production consists almost exclusively of methane, which in turn is many times more harmful to the climate than carbon dioxide. The International Energy Agency (IEA) assumes that an average of 1.5 percent escapes into the atmosphere through leakage during the extraction and transport of methane worldwide. According to Agora, this would in turn lead to blue hydrogen exceeding the threshold listed in the EU taxonomy.
If one follows the argumentation of climate researchers Robert Howarth and Mark Jacobson of Cornell and Stanford Universities, who assume a leakage rate of 3.5 percent, the greenhouse gas effect of blue hydrogen would even be 20 percent higher than that of burning coal.
The announced gas market package is therefore to include a new regulation with which the EU Commission wants to get the leakage problem under control and significantly reduce emissions. According to the leaked draft, however, the new rules will primarily apply to production and transport within the EU. Only “incentives” are to be created for importers. The EU imports 90 percent of its natural gas needs from third countries.
“The drafts show the signature of the gas lobby, which refuses to take responsibility for methane emissions in its supply chain and is eyeing the lucrative hydrogen market,” Jutta Paulus (Greens) tells Europe.Table. The MEP was responsible for the EU Parliament’s own-initiative report on reducing methane emissions. In it, the parliament had already demanded that importers also be held accountable.
That things should now be different is unacceptable to Paul. “The dependence on fossil imports has led to the current energy price crisis. It would be a staircase joke if the gas market package were to exacerbate these dependencies instead of guaranteeing climate protection and affordable prices for European citizens through a clear preference for renewable energies.”
Rising energy prices have become one of the European citizens’ most urgent concerns. In another week of record-breaking energy prices, the 27 EU energy ministers meet today in Brussels to discuss measures and policies that will be crucial to push our energy system towards a cleaner and more resilient model.
Over 50 million Europeans currently live in energy poverty, having to choose between heating their homes and having food on the table, a number that is set to skyrocket this winter if member states do not choose the right policy toolbox.
Getting to the root of the energy price issue, there is no doubt that the EU’s heavy fossil-based energy mix, and its dependency on fossil fuel imports in a global market led by speculation and volatility, are the main cause of our soaring energy bills. Moreover, the cost of the kilowatt-hour in the EU energy market is set by the highest-priced energy source, which nowadays is fossil gas and coal.
Despite this well-known economic and regulatory context, some EU leaders are also trying to instrumentalize this situation to blame the European Green Deal and the Fit for 55 Package – which is so far not even agreed upon and will not be enforced for at least another two years – in order to claim EU funding for non-clean energy such as gas and nuclear.
Paradoxically, the European Green Deal has proven to be the best tool to implement the most effective solution we have against energy poverty: energy efficiency. More than seven out of ten European buildings are energy inefficient, which has been identified as the root cause of energy poverty and overconsumption. The poor energy performance of European housing stock makes the building sector the single largest energy consumer in the EU and one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, accounting for one-third of total EU emissions.
Member States have never been in a better position to tackle this energy issue since the European Green Deal provides the necessary regulation, financing, and technical assistance to deliver deep renovation programs that prioritize energy-poor households and their gender dimension. If they pursue the Renovation Wave’s objective of the deep renovating of 35 million homes by 2030, their domestic heating demand will reduce by 60%.
Renovations, if climate-friendly and carried out without installing gas boilers from 2025, can play a crucial role against energy poverty and in achieving the Paris climate targets. But once again, EU governments are turning a deaf ear to these energy measures.
The Commission’s proposal on the revision of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) strengthens the current EU energy policy by increasing the targets for 2030. However, these targets are still below the level of energy savings and renewables achievable and required to enable the transition to the fully decarbonized energy system needed for climate neutrality. To be aligned with the 1.5C trajectory, by 2030 the EU needs to set a renewable energy target of at least 50% in gross final energy consumption, and a target of 45% for energy efficiency.
On the renewables side, the proposed binding targets for heating and cooling and decarbonization plans at the national level are very welcome. However, in district heating, where a switch from fossil to renewable energy is urgently needed, a 2.1% annual renewables increase is not enough to be in line with full decarbonization by 2040.
In addition, member states are resisting binding targets for renewable expansion and energy efficiency at the national level. This means that the full potential of these key instruments is not being exploited.
We should remember that the cleanest energy is that which is not consumed. Rapid mobilization of energy-saving potential through accelerated renovation, modernization of industrial production processes, and a rapid increase in the use of renewables in households could lead Europe to climate neutrality by 2040.
This position was taken from an article originally published on the EEB META news channel.
With all the farewell interviews, political obituaries, and reviews of the “Merkel years” that could be read, seen, and heard in recent months, one could almost feel that the Chancellor’s long-announced departure was permanent. But now Angela Merkel is really leaving. Yesterday, the German Armed Forces said goodbye with a Great Taps. At the Chancellor’s request, the staff music corps played, among others, the Nina Hagen song “Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen” and “Für mich soll’s rote Rosen regnen” by Hildegard Knef. Merkel followed the ceremony visibly moved.
There were also political farewells in Germany’s southern neighbor. In Austria, however, things were less thoughtful: after former chancellor and ÖVP party leader Sebastian Kurz announced in the morning that he was turning his back on politics, his fellow campaigners followed suit. First, acting Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg announced his resignation, a short time later Finance Minister Gernot Blümel followed suit. “I have decided to leave politics,” said Blümel, who is considered a close confidant of Kurz. The Kurz system was considered extremely stable until recently, but now it is crumbling. According to media reports citing government circles, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) is to take over the post of chancellor.
The process by which the Data Governance Act passed was rather peaceful. Now the next project is on the agenda. With the Data Act, the EU wants to promote the exchange of data and at the same time create clearer rules for data use. The potential for conflict is greater, writes Falk Steiner, capturing reactions from the business community.
In mid-December, the legislative texts with which the EU Commission wants to orient the European gas market towards hydrogen are to be presented. First drafts are already circulating and show that the focus is clearly on low-carbon fuels – such as blue hydrogen. But this is only supposedly climate-friendly, as Timo Landenberger analyses. One critic wants to recognize the “signature of the gas lobby” in the drafts.
Europe’s data rights strategy must meet several requirements at once: On the one hand, it must guarantee the protection of European values, on the other hand, it must ensure the functioning of the markets, and thirdly, it is a geopolitical lever. The protection of personal data, primarily known under the heading of the General Data Protection Regulation, has set the style: The EU can obviously set standards so that the rest of the world has to follow them.
But since the debate about whether data is the new oil, two other aspects have also come increasingly into focus: Data as the basis of power, especially market power, and data as the raw material for economic prosperity.
With the Data Governance Act, the EU has now given itself a legal framework to promote this prosperity: It lays down the essential rules on how supply and demand are to be brought together via intermediary institutions, the data exchanges of the future – and, if possible, without encouraging the formation of new monopolies.
And the geopolitical dimension is also taken into account: the DGA contains rules under which conditions data may be transferred to third countries. Admittedly, these rules are not quite as strict as those of the General Data Protection Regulation, since data relating to individuals is already subject to the GDPR rules. However, the inspiration and intention here are hard to miss: If you want to work with Europe, you have to accept Europe’s rules.
However, the regulation that will now follow and build on the DGA could be particularly important for the actual emergence of the European data market: the Data Act. On one hand, the EU wants to use this to promote the exchange of data between various participants, especially between companies, but also the state should share data and use it itself. On the other hand, the Data Act is also intended to create clearer rules for the use of data. The business community is divided or even undecided on this project.
“The data law is important for us because it should also include machine data: Industry 4.0, networked factories, and digital business models are based on data exchange,” the German Engineering Federation (VDMA), for example, informs us. “A law that seeks to regulate this data exchange must be designed with the utmost caution if there are to be no setbacks for the digitization of industry.” The approach of horizontal regulation harbors many problems, especially if very different players and industries are subjected to common standards.
There is no clearly regulated right of ownership to data – and no such right is planned with the Data Act. In contrast to personal data, the question of who may dispose of other types of data is therefore highly controversial. For example, should the owner of a car be allowed to dispose of sensor data, the car manufacturer, the manufacturer of the sensor, the supplier of the assembly, or the supplier whose operating system is installed on this end device – and whose software has read it out? Who may make this data available to whom and under what conditions? Is the owner allowed to grant access to a workshop of his choice? Or would there have to be shared rights of disposal between the parties involved?
At the same time, however, those involved in the mass generation and use of real data are in many cases not private individuals, but entrepreneurs. And they are basically free to structure their contractual relationships, regardless of market power, as long as this is not abused. The VDMA, for example, warns: “In the case of industrial data, the data sovereignty of companies must be strengthened above all, and investments in data generation and use must be protected. Consumer protection standards have their value, but should not be mixed up with the B2B sector.
The EU Commission is currently taking preventive action against such fears of overregulation through the Data Act: ” No one is being forced to share data. It’s about making data usable,” said Christiane Canenbley, deputy head of cabinet of Commission Vice-President Margarethe Vestager, at an event in Brussels on Thursday. “We can only really get the data economy moving forward if we have clear rules under which small and medium enterprises have good opportunities and a good legislative framework.”
In fact, more and more industries are confronted with the problem. Craftsmen are just as dependent on the manufacturers of their tools as construction companies are on the use of data, which is to play an increasingly strong role in the context of standardized construction via Building Information Modelling in order to build more efficiently, faster and more cost-effectively. And in the case of farmers, access to data is already a massively contentious issue, which is also occupying the new traffic light government in the coalition agreement. The threat of dependence on individual suppliers has been a recurring theme there for years.
Other players, however, warn against focusing too much on data generation and thus on the data producers: “A large data set alone does not create added value,” says Sabrina Caroli from the industry association Bitkom, in which the IT companies are organized. Only the targeted evaluation can tap the potential of the data. However, the evaluation is not likely to be the subject of the Data Act – but in many cases will take place within the framework of the AI Regulation.
In fact, it is already becoming apparent that the fragile interplay of the digital legislative initiatives consisting of the GDPR, DMA, DGA, DSA, AIA and, in the future, the Data Act will remain problematic. For political reasons, the latter should not touch on major problems in order not to jeopardize its adoption. The EU Commission’s proposal for this set of rules has meanwhile been postponed until the beginning of 2022. However, sectoral regulations, for example for the automotive sector, are already in the works, whose relationship to the Data Act is not least to create facts well in advance of its possible adoption.
Meanwhile, CSU MEP Markus Ferber hopes that the interlocking digital laws will eventually settle into a cozy coexistence: “I have a great amount of optimism that we won’t invent something new again now, but that overall this will fit into the set of rules we started in the area of digitalization.”
Green hydrogen is supposed to do the trick. Produced by means of electrolysis processes on the basis of regenerative electricity sources, the gas is to become the climate-neutral energy source of the future for all those sectors that cannot be electrified or can only be electrified with difficulty. These include the steel and cement industries, but also parts of the transport sector.
The European Commission is trying by all means to accelerate the market ramp-up. At the European Hydrogen Week, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced her intention to increase the production of green hydrogen in the EU to ten million tons per year by 2030. According to a study by the Aurora Research Institute (ARI), electrolysis projects with a total capacity of more than 200 GW are planned worldwide by 2040. 85 percent of these are in Europe and 23 percent in Germany alone.
Yet, there is still a long way to go. Most of these projects are still at an early concept stage and are not economically viable. According to ARI, hydrogen electrolyzers with a total capacity of 0.2 GW, one-thousandth of what is planned, are currently in operation worldwide. In the EU, hydrogen accounts for about two percent of the energy mix. Over 90 percent of this is generated by fossil fuels. In addition, the expansion of renewable energies is rather sluggish and must be massively accelerated in view of the increasing demand for electricity in order to be available in sufficient quantities for the production of green hydrogen.
The much-awaited alternative: blue hydrogen. This is produced from natural gas, but the carbon dioxide produced in the process is captured from the air and stored (carbon capture and storage, CCS). With a new legislative package, the EU Commission wants to orient the European gas market towards hydrogen. The corresponding legislation is to be presented on December 14th.
First drafts have already been circulating since last week and put a clear focus on low-carbon fuels such as blue hydrogen. This could play an important role in the energy transition, “especially in the short and medium-term, to rapidly reduce emissions from existing fuels and support the introduction of renewable fuels such as renewable hydrogen,” the draft states.
In addition, an EU-wide certification system is to be introduced that also covers low-carbon fuels. This would allow member states to compare different decarbonization options and consider them as viable solutions in their energy mixes. To ensure that low-carbon fuels have the same impact as other renewable alternatives, the use of a “similar methodological approach based on a life-cycle assessment of total greenhouse gas emissions” is important in the certification process.
The Commission intends to set out the exact criteria for certification in a delegated act. However, the draft gas market directive states that low-carbon hydrogen is “hydrogen whose energy content comes from non-renewable sources and which complies with a greenhouse gas emission reduction threshold of [70 percent].”
The figure is based on the EU taxonomy and is still up for discussion. “The percentages will be discussed, but this is a good basis for negotiations,” says Markus Pieper, industrial policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU in the EU Parliament. “The fact that the Commission is even thinking in the direction of making low-carbon solutions possible and allowing them as transitions is already a very good sign.”
According to a study by the think tank Agora Energiewende, CO2 storage of up to 98 percent would be possible with the production of blue hydrogen. However, this figure is already considered optimistic. CCS technologies have hardly been tested yet and critics of the technology doubt that the capture and storage of CO2 can actually keep the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere permanently. Agora is therefore calling for strict standards for the storage sites and regular monitoring and review.
But even with a CO2 capture rate of 98 percent, blue hydrogen would be anything but low-emission. At least not when the entire value chain is taken into account. This is because the natural gas required for production consists almost exclusively of methane, which in turn is many times more harmful to the climate than carbon dioxide. The International Energy Agency (IEA) assumes that an average of 1.5 percent escapes into the atmosphere through leakage during the extraction and transport of methane worldwide. According to Agora, this would in turn lead to blue hydrogen exceeding the threshold listed in the EU taxonomy.
If one follows the argumentation of climate researchers Robert Howarth and Mark Jacobson of Cornell and Stanford Universities, who assume a leakage rate of 3.5 percent, the greenhouse gas effect of blue hydrogen would even be 20 percent higher than that of burning coal.
The announced gas market package is therefore to include a new regulation with which the EU Commission wants to get the leakage problem under control and significantly reduce emissions. According to the leaked draft, however, the new rules will primarily apply to production and transport within the EU. Only “incentives” are to be created for importers. The EU imports 90 percent of its natural gas needs from third countries.
“The drafts show the signature of the gas lobby, which refuses to take responsibility for methane emissions in its supply chain and is eyeing the lucrative hydrogen market,” Jutta Paulus (Greens) tells Europe.Table. The MEP was responsible for the EU Parliament’s own-initiative report on reducing methane emissions. In it, the parliament had already demanded that importers also be held accountable.
That things should now be different is unacceptable to Paul. “The dependence on fossil imports has led to the current energy price crisis. It would be a staircase joke if the gas market package were to exacerbate these dependencies instead of guaranteeing climate protection and affordable prices for European citizens through a clear preference for renewable energies.”
Rising energy prices have become one of the European citizens’ most urgent concerns. In another week of record-breaking energy prices, the 27 EU energy ministers meet today in Brussels to discuss measures and policies that will be crucial to push our energy system towards a cleaner and more resilient model.
Over 50 million Europeans currently live in energy poverty, having to choose between heating their homes and having food on the table, a number that is set to skyrocket this winter if member states do not choose the right policy toolbox.
Getting to the root of the energy price issue, there is no doubt that the EU’s heavy fossil-based energy mix, and its dependency on fossil fuel imports in a global market led by speculation and volatility, are the main cause of our soaring energy bills. Moreover, the cost of the kilowatt-hour in the EU energy market is set by the highest-priced energy source, which nowadays is fossil gas and coal.
Despite this well-known economic and regulatory context, some EU leaders are also trying to instrumentalize this situation to blame the European Green Deal and the Fit for 55 Package – which is so far not even agreed upon and will not be enforced for at least another two years – in order to claim EU funding for non-clean energy such as gas and nuclear.
Paradoxically, the European Green Deal has proven to be the best tool to implement the most effective solution we have against energy poverty: energy efficiency. More than seven out of ten European buildings are energy inefficient, which has been identified as the root cause of energy poverty and overconsumption. The poor energy performance of European housing stock makes the building sector the single largest energy consumer in the EU and one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, accounting for one-third of total EU emissions.
Member States have never been in a better position to tackle this energy issue since the European Green Deal provides the necessary regulation, financing, and technical assistance to deliver deep renovation programs that prioritize energy-poor households and their gender dimension. If they pursue the Renovation Wave’s objective of the deep renovating of 35 million homes by 2030, their domestic heating demand will reduce by 60%.
Renovations, if climate-friendly and carried out without installing gas boilers from 2025, can play a crucial role against energy poverty and in achieving the Paris climate targets. But once again, EU governments are turning a deaf ear to these energy measures.
The Commission’s proposal on the revision of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) strengthens the current EU energy policy by increasing the targets for 2030. However, these targets are still below the level of energy savings and renewables achievable and required to enable the transition to the fully decarbonized energy system needed for climate neutrality. To be aligned with the 1.5C trajectory, by 2030 the EU needs to set a renewable energy target of at least 50% in gross final energy consumption, and a target of 45% for energy efficiency.
On the renewables side, the proposed binding targets for heating and cooling and decarbonization plans at the national level are very welcome. However, in district heating, where a switch from fossil to renewable energy is urgently needed, a 2.1% annual renewables increase is not enough to be in line with full decarbonization by 2040.
In addition, member states are resisting binding targets for renewable expansion and energy efficiency at the national level. This means that the full potential of these key instruments is not being exploited.
We should remember that the cleanest energy is that which is not consumed. Rapid mobilization of energy-saving potential through accelerated renovation, modernization of industrial production processes, and a rapid increase in the use of renewables in households could lead Europe to climate neutrality by 2040.
This position was taken from an article originally published on the EEB META news channel.
