The European Union energy transition: key priorities for the next five years

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The European Union energy transition: key priorities for the next five years

The new members of the European Parliament and European Commission who start their mandates in 2019 should put in place major policy elements to unlea

Publishing date: 09 July 2019
Authors: Georg Zachmann Simone Tagliapietra Ottmar Edenhofer Jean-Michel Glachant Pedro Linares Andreas Loeschel

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The issue

Over the last decade, the European Union has pursued a proactive climate policy and has integrated a significant amount of renewable technologies – such as solar and wind – into the established energy system. These efforts have proved successful and continuing along this pathway, increasing renewables and improving energy efficiency would not require substantial policy shifts. But the EU now needs a much deeper energy transformation to: i) decarbonise in line with the Paris agreement; ii) seize the economic and industrial opportunities offered by this global transformation; and iii) develop an EU approach to energy competitiveness and security, as the EU has neither the United States’ shale potential nor China’s top-down investment possibilities.

Policy challenge

A full-fledged energy transition is becoming economically and technically feasible, with most of the necessary technologies now available and technology costs declining. The cost of the transition would be similar to that of maintaining the existing system, if appropriate policies and regulations are put in place. In short, the EU could benefit from deep decarbonisation irrespective of what other economies around the world do. The transition can also be socially acceptable, if the right policies are put in place to control and mitigate the distributional effects of deeper decarbonisation. The time to act is now, because energy is a rigid system in which infrastructure and regulatory changes take a decade to be fully implemented, while competition is not sleeping – as Chinese solar panels and the rise of the electric vehicles industry clearly show. Policy choices made up to 2024 will define the shape of the EU energy system by 2050.

About the authors

Georg Zachmann

Georg Zachmann is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel, where he has worked since 2009 on energy and climate policy. His work focuses on regional and distributional impacts of decarbonisation, the analysis and design of carbon, gas and electricity markets, and EU energy and climate policies. Previously, he worked at the German Ministry of Finance, the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, the energy think tank LARSEN in Paris, and the policy consultancy Berlin Economics.
Simone Tagliapietra

Simone Tagliapietra is a Senior fellow at Bruegel.

He is also a Part-time professor at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) of the European University Institute and an Adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Europe of The Johns Hopkins University.

His research focuses on the EU climate and energy policy, and on its industrial and social dimensions. With a record of numerous policy and scientific publications, also in leading journals such as Nature and Science, he is the author of Global Energy Fundamentals (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of The Macroeconomics of Decarbonisation (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

On the basis of his policy and scientific production, Dr. Tagliapietra regularly supports EU and national institutions in the development of their public policies in the field of climate and energy, also through regular interaction with public decision-makers in EU and national institutions, as well as through regular parliamentary testimonies in the European Parliament and various national parliamentary assemblies inside and outside Europe, such as the French Senate, the UK House of Lords and the US Senate. His columns and policy work are widely published and cited in leading international media.

Dr. Tagliapietra also is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Senior associate of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. He holds a PhD in International Political Economy from the Catholic University of Milan, where he previously graduated under the supervision of Professor Alberto Quadrio Curzio and where he also served as an Assistant professor (tenure-track) until 2024. Born in the Dolomites in 1988, he speaks Italian, English and French.
Ottmar Edenhofer

Ottmar Edenhofer is Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Professor for the Economics of Climate Change at the Technical University Berlin as well as founding director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). Furthermore, he is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of the National Academy of Science and Engineering acatech. From 2008 to 2015 he served as Co-Chair of Working Group III of the IPCC, shaping the Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change Mitigation substantially.
Jean-Michel Glachant

Jean-Michel Glachant is the Director of the Florence School of Regulation and the Holder of the Loyola de Palacio Chair.

Glachant took his Ph.D. in economics at La Sorbonne in France. He worked in the industry and private sector before becoming professor at La Sorbonne.

He has been advisor of DG TREN, DG COMP and DG RESEARCH at the European Commission and of the French Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE). He has been coordinator and scientific advisor of several European research projects. Jean-Michel Glachant has been editor-in-chief of EEEP: Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy (an IAEE journal) and he is a current member of the Council of the International Association for Energy Economics.
Pedro Linares
Andreas Loeschel

Theme: Energy and climate policy Macroeconomic policy and governance
Keyword: eu governance energy decarbonisation climate change
Language: English