Future legislation aimed at accelerating industrial deployment (the Industrial Accelerator Act) must not replicate the model of the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), say Germany, France and Italy in a tripartite declaration on Monday 29 September.
According to the three countries, this initiative should help energy-intensive industries to mobilise investment to decarbonise. When presenting their initiative, the three countries focused on the steel, automotive and chemical industries. These key sectors of EU industry are struggling to make the green transition, while demand is weak or captured by international competition.
This slowness can also be explained by “the risk associated with these pioneering projects. France wishes to emphasise the need to better reward the ‘first movers’ who take the risk of investing in deep decarbonisation”, explained the French Minister for Industry, Marc Ferracci, when presenting the declaration.
So rather than speeding up installation permits, the EU needs to take more drastic measures, particularly in terms of investment. In particular, it should “support programmes for financing the industrial decarbonisation, e.g. via the ‘Innovation Fund’ for decarbonisation”.
Another option for these three countries is pilot markets and European preference. The aim is to use public procurement and other national public programmes to create pilot markets for green and European products.
European performance criteria in terms of carbon footprint, in the form of a label, for sectors such as steel or cement could be taken into account in these pilot markets. Such labels “give a clear indication regarding what is transformative”, say the authors of the statement.
See the trilateral declaration: https://aeur.eu/f/io3 (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)