The Green Tank has submitted its feedback to the European Commission’s revision of the EU Energy Security Framework, emphasizing the urgent need to move away from fossil fuels and redefine energy security around renewable energy, electrification, energy efficiency, and citizen participation.
In its comments, Green Tank focuses on three key pillars:
Energy security and transition to clean solutions: Diversifying electricity sources by shifting to renewables and electrification is a priority for reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels. Strengthening electric interconnections, storage, demand-side management, and green hydrogen can play a crucial role in decarbonizing the most polluting sectors of the economy. At the same time, the new framework should incorporate and build upon existing policies such as the EU ETS2.
Distributed renewables and citizen participation: Active citizen involvement through energy communities, energy sharing, and self-production empowers citizens, strengthens local energy resilience, and energy democracy. The new framework must remove regulatory, technical, and financial barriers and be based on the Citizens Energy Package.
Governance and financing: The governance of the framework should be characterized by transparency, monitoring, and consistency with climate neutrality goals. Financial mechanisms must protect consumers and exclude all support for fossil fuels, while promoting clean flexibility solutions.
Regarding the four policy directions presented by the European Commission, the core of the energy security strategy in terms of cross-sectoral transformation must be renewables and storage, electrification, interconnections, and demand-side management. At the same time, smart simplification of procedures is useful, as long as it does not compromise environmental protection and transparency. EU-level action must promote cooperation among Member States, without limiting citizen participation and local initiatives.
Read the full feedback here.
