EU's climate chief calls for ‘Marshall plan’ for Europe’s energy

A Marshall Plan for Europe’s energy – or a ‘true energy union’ – to deliver the Clean Industrial Deal is advocated by Wopke Hoekstra, European Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth.

Delivering the afternoon keynote at EU Sustainable Energy Week, Hoekstra echoed the three crises in Europe’s energy sector outlined by Energy and Housing Commissioner Dan Jørgensen in his opening address – security, climate and competitiveness – but replacing the former with independence, in calling for a Marshall plan for the sector to address them.

Issuing a clarion call for help from across the sector, Hoekstra emphasised the need to articulate issues around climate to overcome misconceptions such as that climate action is simply about altruism and saving the Earth.

“Europe is heating twice as quickly as the rest of the planet,” he commented, adding that at the nexus of these challenges is the clean industrial deal, with its intent to provide a business plan to decarbonise and reindustrialise the region and thereby support making it more competitive.

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“It is a signal we are fully committed to the clean transition and if we pull it off it will provide the investments our businesses are looking for.”

Commenting on the current status of businesses, Hoekstra said that whereas startups are in similar proportions to the US, with scaleups there is a huge difference as it is simply too difficult for them in Europe.

To this end €100 billion of funding is to be put into future clean EU manufacturing in the next few years.

“The EU is pulling out all it can to reindustrialise the economy,” he said, invoking the need for the Marshall plan for energy, or the ‘true energy union’ as Jørgensen terms it.

He suggested five key elements – the need to double down on renewables and solar in particular, to invest massively in grid capacity, to develop interconnectors for cross-border trading between all the 27 member states, to ramp up investment in storage and to advance flexibility.

Commenting on the potential of the latter, he cited the case of a paper mill in an unnamed European country that was able on good days to make more money from selling capacity to the grid than from manufacturing paper.

“The CEO of the electricity company told me that with 50 to 100 such companies, up to 8% of capacity could easily be freed up on the network and that could be scaled across Europe. It sounds small but its absolutely massive and of course it also impacts investment needs in the grid,” he concluded.