The European Union has set out to win the ‘green’ race over the United States and China. To this end, the Commission has presented this Wednesday the first keys to the strategy with which the EU intends to accelerate investments in green industries by relaxing the rules for State aid or dealing with the impact of subsidies from other countries that Europeans considering “unfair” for their market.
The president of the Community Executive, Ursula von der Leyen, has been in charge of presenting these guidelines to counteract the impact on the European economy of the new American Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), with a package of 369,000 million dollars in subsidies to boost investment in the United States, and the investments in clean technologies announced by China, which exceeds 280,000 million dollars.
In the medium term, the Commission intends to provide a structural response to investment needs by proposing a European Sovereignty Fund as part of the review of the multiannual financial framework before the summer of 2023, but for which it has not yet provided figures.
Brussels has taken into account that the EU countries already have the 27 national recovery and resilience plans that make available to the States an amount of 250,000 million euros for green measures, including investments in support of decarbonization industry, while financing of net-zero industrial value chains can be increased in scale and speed through targeted state support.
However, in order to avoid the fragmentation of the Single Market due to the different levels of national and different EU support to facilitate the green transition throughout the Union, which is why it advocates giving Member States more flexibility to grant aid in renewable energy, decarbonization technologies and energy efficiency measures.
The Commission proposes making these rules on state aid more flexible, which will be used through the Temporary Crisis and Transition Framework (MTCT) for state aid, which will consist of expanding the provisions for clean technologies and storage, eliminating the need for less mature ones or extending deadlines to complete projects.
These are the guidelines that Brussels will have to guide the debate of the leaders at their next meeting on February 9 and 10, where the contributions of the Twenty-seven will be heard, to return with concrete measures in time for the March summit that will bring together the contributions from Member States.
The offer of the Community Executive also coincides with the Spanish proposal to deal with the IRA that raised the granting of fast lanes and letters of guarantee or the suppression of minimum thresholds to participate in projects of common interest, in order to accelerate investments in key sectors for the green transition as energy.
