The EU’s AccelerateEU plan points in the right direction. Whether member states follow at the speed Europe needs is another matter entirely.
For the second time in less than five years, Europeans are paying the price of Europe’s dependency on imported fossil fuels. AccelerateEU is the European Commission’s answer to an energy shock that has now run for a month and a half. The numbers behind the plan, published this week, are bad. Since the Iran war began, the bloc has spent 22 billion euros more on fossil fuel imports than it would otherwise have done. Six billion of that went in the first 17 days alone. This is the second such shock in four years.
REPowerEU in 2022 was about Russian pipelines. AccelerateEU in 2026 is about the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 per cent of global oil flows and which has been largely closed since March. European gas prices have risen by more than 70 per cent since hostilities began. Brent has traded above, or just below, 100 US dollars a barrel for weeks. Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission’s president, told reporters this month that Europe was paying “a very high price” for its “over-dependency on fossil fuels”. The diagnosis was the same in 2022. The patient is the same. Only the vector has changed.
On that, at least, the Commission and its critics agree. The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a network of green NGOs, welcomed the plan’s focus on electrification (heat pumps, industrial electricity, cheaper power bills relative to gas) as the right direction of travel. Luke Haywood, head of climate and energy at the EEB, put the bill for the previous crisis at around 540 billion euros spent shielding consumers from prices without tackling what had caused them. “The emphasis on cutting fossil fuel use through electrification and energy savings is the right direction,” he said this week. “But these lessons are still on paper, not in practice.”
Indeed they are. Though renewables now supply 48 per cent of EU electricity, and the Russian share of gas imports has fallen from 45 per cent in 2021 to 12 per cent in 2025, transport and heating remain stubbornly hooked on oil and gas. In 2024 roughly 19 per cent of the bloc’s net oil imports came from the Gulf. That is the vulnerability the Iran war has exploited.
The plan’s structural measures are serious enough. The Commission wants electricity taxed more lightly than the fossil fuels it is meant to replace, a sensible idea but one that ran aground in November 2025, when an earlier attempt at reform failed to secure the unanimity required for EU tax legislation. Brussels will try again, with a binding electrification target proposed before the summer. New financing vehicles (an Energy Transition Investment Council, an Energy Efficiency Financing Coalition) are also on the table, alongside energy vouchers for low-income households, a temporary ban on disconnections, and social leasing schemes for electric vehicles. These are good ideas. Most of them were also good ideas in 2022.
Thin gruel
The trouble lies in the financing. The EEB reckons 660 billion euros a year in investment is needed until 2030 to deliver the electrified economy AccelerateEU envisages. The plan hopes to mobilise this mostly from private capital, topped up by reusing Recovery and Resilience Funds intended for pandemic recovery. Dedicated public money is thin. A windfall tax on the oil and gas majors now profiting from the crisis, supported by both the EEB and Beyond Fossil Fuels, a campaign group, is notable mainly for its absence: the plan acknowledges member states may levy such taxes but stops short of proposing a bloc-wide framework. Juliet Phillips, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, called for more clarity on financing and warned that “a strategy without a fossil fuel phase-out framework will keep people in Europe trapped in an endless cycle of energy shocks.”
On the muscle-memory response, the Commission is fighting the ghosts of 2022. Germany, Italy and others are again reaching for broad cuts to petrol and diesel excise. Greece is extending a motor fuel subsidy, possibly to 0.20 euros a litre, and weighing a fresh round of fuel vouchers. Such measures are fiscally costly, poorly targeted at households that need help, and prolong the consumption Brussels is trying to suppress. Direct payments and investment support, Haywood said, “would be more efficient, more socially targeted, and better for the climate”. The ministries distributing the subsidies know this. They also know their voters.
A note of frustration, however, runs through the EEB’s response to the plan’s enthusiasm for small modular reactors. These unproven devices, pitched as part of a near-term crisis response, distract from faster and cheaper fixes already on shelves: insulation, rooftop solar, heat pumps, grid upgrades. Von der Leyen has described SMRs as “the way to go forward” alongside renewables. The EEB calls the framing “an absurd distraction”. Both cannot be right.
Phillips’s line is the one to hang on to. “This really has to be Europe’s last fossil fuels crisis.” Twice now the continent has discovered, with a faintly theatrical sense of surprise, that importing most of its energy from unstable regimes is a security problem as much as a climate one. Whether a third crisis arrives depends on how countries approach AccelerateEU over the summer, when the electrification target is tabled. The direction is agreed. The speed is not.
Photo: Dreamstime.