Trade group WindEurope has criticised the EU’s Green Industry Plan for being light on details in terms of support for turbine manufacturing to reach targets.
Today, the Commission proposed the Net-Zero Industry Act to scale up manufacturing of clean technologies in the EU and make sure it is well-equipped for the clean-energy transition.
This initiative was announced by President Ursula von der Leyen as a part of the Green Deal Industrial Plan.
The Act will strengthen the resilience and competitiveness of net-zero technologies manufacturing in the EU and create better conditions to set up net-zero projects in Europe and attract investments, with the aim that the Union’s overall strategic net-zero technologies manufacturing capacity approaches or reaches at least 40% of the Union’s deployment needs by 2030.
Von der Leyen, said: “We need a regulatory environment that allows us to scale up the clean energy transition quickly.
“The Net-Zero Industry Act will do just that. It will create the best conditions for those sectors that are crucial for us to reach net-zero by 2050: technologies like wind turbines, heat pumps, solar panels, renewable hydrogen as well as CO2 storage.”
WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson said: “The EU’s Green Industry Plan falls short as it stands. Fine, let’s aim to make 36GW of wind turbines in Europe every year. But how?”
National governments have some new flexibility to support green industries, though how they’ll use it is unclear, Dickson added.
He said that while the Sovereignty and Innovation Funds will be key, the EU “must move on from its obsession with technology breakthroughs”.
Dickson said: “Expanding renewable supply chains is a volume game – we simply don’t have enough factories and infrastructure today to build and install the volumes Europe wants.
“It’s good that governments now have to put a premium on sustainability and resilience in their renewables supply chains – it’s crucial they get the detail right here.
“So there are lots of things still to get right to ensure this plan delivers.”