The 2024 EIB Forum sets out Europe’s most urgent priorities for a transition to clean, renewable energy and economic autonomy

The route to European competitiveness lies in increased investment. That investment must be directed towards renewable energy and innovative clean technologies, backed by the political will to ensure better regulation and a just, inclusive transition.

Over the two days, panellists and speakers at the second EIB Group Forum laid out potential solutions to a series of challenges facing Europe, from climate change to the need for secure supplies of critical resources. Across a range of issues, experts echoed the importance of a coordinated European position.

“Partnership is one of the words that you will hear a lot during the Forum,” said Nadia Calviño, president of the European Investment Bank. “Only by joining our forces are we able to succeed in facing the challenges that we have as Europeans.”

Calviño emphasised that joint European action during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine mitigated the economic impact of the crises. Europe created economic responses such as the European Guarantee Fund, worked on common procurement, held a unified front against the invasion of Ukraine, and brought out major climate initiatives in the Green Deal and REPowerEU.

“The crisis did not bite as deeply as was expected,” Calviño said, “because of the coordinated European response. That’s good news, and a lesson for the future.”

The bottom line on competitiveness

The European Union now has to position itself to face the great challenge of climate change – and its geopolitical and social effects. Valdis Dombrovskis, executive vice-president of the European Commission and commissioner for trade, emphasised the central role of investment in strengthening EU competitiveness and resilience.

“The bottom line is that our competitive engine needs maintenance,” he said. “We also need to keep up with others who are racing ahead, so the question is how we maintain our competitive edge.”

The key to increasing private investment is completion of the capital markets union, a measure that numerous experts urged should be done quickly. “Deepening and further integrating Europe’s capital markets is the most cost-effective step we can take to drive capital towards long-term investments,” Dombrovskis said.

Mairead McGuinness, commissioner for financial stability, financial services and the capital markets union at the European Commission, urged “more speed, less resistance, a strong political will, and a timeline” to complete and solidify the capital markets union.

Europe’s unity was a theme taken up by Charles Michel, president of the European Council. “Our single market is the backbone of our prosperity,” he said. “We need to make it easier for our businesses to grow.”

“The EIB has a very important role to play,” Michel added.

Balancing the gas market

Kadri Simson, commissioner for energy at the European Commission, noted that the transition to clean energy is a vital route towards more stable markets and supply.

“Since Russia started its unjustified war against Ukraine and stopped significant shares of deliveries of natural gas supplies to Europe,” Simson said, “we have been able to balance the gas market mainly by prioritising savings, but also by replacing, where possible, natural gas with renewables.”

During the last two years, Simson said, Europe built a record 130 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity. 

That’s important if Europe is to respond to the “weaponization of trade” without replacing “one dependency, such as Russian gas, with other dependencies that could put industry at risk,” said Elga Bartsch, director general for economic policy at Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action. “The energy question…is embedded in the larger geopolitical fragmentation.”

Maroš Šefčovič, the European Commission’s commissioner for the Green Deal, argued for a “less dogmatic” approach to the green transition. “We need to be more pragmatic about our energy sources, about how we can work with green, but also low-carbon sources of energy and hydrogen,” he said.

Competitiveness and cohesion

Several speakers noted the link between Europe’s overall competitiveness, climate action, and other important pillars of EU policy, such as cohesion, which aims to reduce economic disparities between regions of the Union.

“We cannot have a competitive Europe, if we don’t have a cohesive Europe,” said Themis Christophidou, director general for regional and urban policy at the European Commission.

The “just transition” to clean energy is an important element of this cohesion. It is designed to ensure that jobs lost in polluting industries do not lead to some regions being left behind. Climate action and the just transition are inextricably linked, said Wopke Hoekstra, the European Commission’s commissioner for climate action. “You cannot have one without the other,” he said.

When the European Union welcomes current candidate countries to full membership, coordinated responses to crises will be still more difficult – and more vital. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics, said that the European Union will need to become “simpler, more agile. The crises we’ve faced so far showed that we need to be more flexible.”

Regulations for competitiveness

A strong single market is crucial to companies facing this green transition. Mathias Miedreich, chief executive of Belgian materials and recycling group Umicore, said that different rules across the member states cause a major obstacle. Rules forbidding the export of used batteries between countries undermines the advantages of the single market, he added.

“Battery recycling is the only way that the industry can meet the CO₂ legislation for an electric vehicle,” said Miedreich, whose company signed a €350 million loan with the European Investment Bank at the EIB Forum to support R&D and innovation.

Different standards and long waits for permits across the European Union are a barrier to scaling up carbon-reduction technologies in the concrete sector, said Nicola Kim, chief sustainability officer at Heidelberg Materials, one of the world’s largest concrete manufacturers. Europe’s Emissions Trading System, however, and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism help companies accelerate their decarbonisation efforts. The EU Emissions Trading System “really helped us to create long-term planning on decarbonisation,” she said. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism “will be a second facilitator.”

‘Solutions now exist’

Bertrand Piccard, the Swiss explorer and chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, drew a direct line between the issues raised by other participants from competitiveness to clean energy and geopolitics.

“If we want competitiveness in Europe,” he said, “we need cheap energy and the way to have cheap energy is to go into renewables that work, that are proven and not only solar and wind, but also biomass to replace the Russian gas hydroelectricity, and, of course, geothermal.”

“We have to speak about solutions,” Piccard said, “because solutions now exist.”