Lights Out: Is the EU failing on energy policy?

Let’s first remind ourselves of a very simple truth: the modern world is built on energy

It would be almost impossible to find a single action undertaken right now across the whole EU that would be possible without a plentiful supply of energy. Not just heating our homes or charging our phones, but our roads, schools, hospitals and even our political institutions are the product of an era in which energy was available in relative abundance. This is a blessing to which it is almost impossible to do justice. This is Promethean fire writ large. Access to energy at this scale is perhaps the most impressive achievement of the modern world.

But such an achievement is a fragile one too. It relies on serious and sustained attention to the energy system, and on the right policies, technologies and attitudes that promote sensible investment in and maintenance of this almost unmatched good. When the system is infected by politicised goals – such as the logic of environmentalism – the result is a failure to secure the energy we need. This report explains this interplay in extensive detail.

More precisely, this report argues that the EU’s focus on the dogma of environmentalism has seriously distracted it from the foundational question of how to ensure the EU has enough energy. In fact, it is worse than just this: endless policy proposals, meetings and strategies have left Europe dangerously close to being unable to heat, light and power itself.

It needn’t be this way. Until relatively recently, France and Germany offered a practical example of how to both reduce emissions and create the plentiful energy that modern industry and modern life more generally require. This example was of course widespread use of nuclear energy. The fateful move away from nuclear in the case of Germany, and decades of underfunding of the system in France, have left these two giants poorly positioned to respond to the energy shock that is one of the major outcomes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The situation elsewhere in the EU is perhaps more dire still.

As this report details, across almost every aspect of energy policy the EU has actively hampered the development of a modern, energy-rich system. This is true from the question of generation to the issue of imports, or from the infrastructure of energy transmission to the aspirations of EU citizens for affordable bills.

In fact, it seems that the EU actively disagrees with what many would assume to be the common-sense goal of energy policy: producing and circulating more energy. It sometimes seems that the EU operates on the opposite assumption: that the goal of policy is to reduce energy generation and energy demand. Although it is rarely articulated with this level of frankness, the fundamental logic of the ‘Green’ energy movement is energy austerity.

Time and again, the response of EU elites to their manifest failure to secure reliable energy in the quantities needed for modern life has been to exhort EU citizens to use less. Whether accompanied by vague promises to increase efficiency (like the fruitless obsession with insulation), or more forthright demands for energy saving (like reducing car use), the default response of EU elites to their failure to secure reliable energy is to shift the blame on to ordinary people. The desires of normal people for a rich and happy life are recast as dangerous habits destined to lead us to ecological catastrophe.

Access to energy at scale is perhaps the most impressive achievement of the modern world. But it is a fragile one.

What’s more, as this report details, the practical effects of the ‘Greening’ of EU energy policy have been a perverse reliance on fossil fuels. This is not just true of crisis situations like today’s, when countries across the EU have scrambled to re-start burning coal, but more broadly. The availability of Russian gas has been the unstated premise of the EU’s efforts to reduce emissions. The effects of this are of course only now being felt.

In response to these questions, the EU has recently launched several grandiose initiatives. Fit for 55 brings together efforts around reducing emissions by 2030, REPowerEU looks to accelerate the drive to save energy and the shift to renewables, while the Green Deal Industrial Plan will attempt to scale-up manufacturing capacity for net-zero technologies. It does not take an expert to notice that all these initiatives are united by their commitment to the very environmental policies that have long impeded the production of the energy the EU needs. But even less remarked upon is how difficult the continual and dazzling wave of plans, acronyms and buzzwords coming out of Brussels makes it very hard to grasp exactly what the EU is trying to do.

This report is above all a plea for far greater democratic involvement in the question of energy. The EU public are largely absent from the issue of energy – except when certain unrepresentative environmental groups are invited to provide EU policies with a veneer of democratic legitimacy. In the absence of genuine public discussion and debate, EU energy policy has tended to become ever more insular and ineffective.

The argument that follows is not an indictment of the aspiration for cleaner energy. In fact, a low-cost, low-carbon and plentiful energy system is genuinely within reach for EU countries. But the unfortunate correlation of environmentalism with energy austerity has hampered this worthwhile goal. The task for us all, right across the EU, is to seize the many opportunities and innovations that exist, or will soon exist, to create a modern energy system.

We have a chance to seize again Promethean fire to power a continent. This report is an invitation to debate about how to seize that chance.

The full report, published by MCC Brussels, is available by clicking on this link: LIGHTS OUT – Is the EU failing on energy policy?