On Wednesday 17 February, the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union sent the Member States a series of questions aimed at outlining possible energy reforms and investments in the national recovery and resilience plans, with a view to a debate scheduled for 2 March at a meeting of the Council’s Energy Working Group.
The aim of this meeting will be to finalise these plans “with an emphasis on the energy-related flagships and the legal requirements set out in the Regulation on the Recovery and Resilience Facility”, in particular the obligation to devote at least 37% of the total allocation of each plan to climate-related investments, the Portuguese document points out.
In order to prepare for this discussion, the Presidency invites the Member States to prepare a declaration presenting in particular the concrete energy-related reforms they plan to implement to accelerate the green transition.
Lisbon also asks them to reflect on how the recovery funds could improve cross-border projects.
Finally, the Presidency is looking into the Member States’ plans to combine stimulus funds with other European and national funding to develop renewable energies, energy efficiency and infrastructures.
NGOs highlight gaps
While almost all Member States have now submitted their national recovery and resilience plans to the Commission (see EUROPE 12653/10), the Green Recovery Tracker platform, launched by a coalition of NGOs, has already identified climate policy gaps in the French, German, Spanish and Portuguese plans.
On the basis of an analysis of these four plans, the platform stresses that “positive” energy measures, such as investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, storage or “green hydrogen”, are accompanied by “negative” measures that support, for example, infrastructure for coal or fossil gas.
In particular, the analysis shows that the “green spending” planned by France represents only 23% of total French stimulus spending, well below the EU threshold of 37%. In addition, 55% of all planned spending has - or “risks” having - a negative impact on the green transition, according to Green Recovery Tracker.
For the other countries examined, these shares are : 22 and 36% (Germany); 56 and 24% (Portugal), 53 and 5% (Spain).
It should be noted that Green Recovery Tracker obtains different results for Germany and Portugal when its analysis focuses only on the measures included in the draft recovery plans and not on the full range of all the measures envisaged for the recovery of these countries. In this case, the share of “green spending” increases from 22% to 34% for Germany, but decreases from 56% to 27% for Portugal.
See the Presidency paper: http://bit.ly/2OKAUrT and the analysis from Green Recovery Tracker: http://bit.ly/3bkGsRt (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)