Letter to informal Energy Council
The lesson from successive fossil fuel crises is clear: Europe needs to protect people from immediate fossil fuel price shocks while tackling the structural fossil fuel dependence that causes them.
Dear Minister,
Ahead of the Informal Energy Council in Dublin, Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe welcomes the Presidency’s focus on energy affordability, electrification, and European energy security and cooperation. These discussions come at a critical moment. After another summer of extreme heat, drought and wildfires, Europe is heading towards winter once again exposed to volatile fossil fuel prices and geopolitical instability. Households, businesses and public budgets continue to bear the cost of an energy system that remains largely dependent on fossil fuels.
Europeans should not have to pay twice for this dependency: through worsening climate impacts and through unaffordable and unpredictable energy bills.
The lesson from successive fossil fuel crises is clear: Europe needs to protect people from immediate fossil fuel price shocks while tackling the structural fossil fuel dependence that causes them.
- Affordability : protect people today and make polluters pay
We welcome the Presidency’s focus on how governments can address energy affordability as part of Europe’s wider cost of living crisis. With increasing energy costs following the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, doing nothing is not an option. But we cannot tackle high energy prices by reinforcing the very dependence that makes Europe vulnerable to price shocks: fossil fuels.
We call on Ministers to:
● Address the root cause of high energy prices and ensure governments’ responses are carefully designed not to prolong fossil dependence or subsidise fossil fuel production and consumption.
● Make full use of national and EU resources, in particular the Social Climate Fund, to protect vulnerable and low-income people from unaffordable bills while preserving incentives for energy savings.
●Ensure that those profiting from the energy and climate crisis contribute to paying for the response. Fossil fuel profits should be captured through permanent profit taxation and revenues recycled towards targeted household support and investsments that permanently reduce depedence on fossil fuels and encourage the shift to renewable energy.
● Coordinate these efforts at EU level, building towards a permanent differentiated corporate tax framework for fossil fuel companies. This would also help to finance adaptation and rising climate damages.
- Reduce energy demand and accelerate renewables and RES-based electrification
Reducing Europe’s energy demand is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to strengthen energy security and affordability, and to curb dangerous greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency reduces dependence on fossil fuel and exposure to price and supply shocks, structurally lowers bills for households and businesses, and strengthens industrial resilience. Without the efficiency improvements achieved over the past two decades, EU energy consumption would be around 29% higher today, while further efficiency gains are projected to reduce the EU’s fossil fuel import bill by €33 billion in 2030 and €70 billion by 2040.
We call on Ministers to:
● Lock in structural reductions in energy demand by accelerating building renovation, improving efficiency across industry and transport, and enabling demand-side flexibility. Full implementation of the Energy Efficiency Directive and Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is therefore essential.
●Address luxury uses with adequate taxation of private jets, frequent flyers and luxury yachts, which in member states still benefit from preferential treatment.
● Ensure that energy efficiency, renewables and renewables-based electrification advance together. This requires rapid investment in grids, storage and flexibility, but also the right price signal.
●Ensure taxation stops making electricity more expensive relative to gas and instead incentivises the switch from fossil fuels to renewable electricity, while protecting essential consumption and energy-saving incentives.
●Ensure network tariffs are fair to allow consumers to benefit from demand flexibility, to lower overall system costs, without shifting grid costs from large industry and data centres onto households.
●Ensure the post-2030 energy framework reflects this direction, through ambitious and binding renewable energy and energy efficiency targets, robust national accountability and effective delivery mechanisms, and a framework that accelerates renewables-based electrification and fossil fuel phase-out. Weakening the framework in the name of simplification would increase uncertainty precisely when Europe needs investment and delivery at scale.
3. Make ending fossil-fuel dependence the foundation of Europe’s energy security
Europe’s energy and climate security as well as Member States’ fiscal sustainability should start with reducing the fossil fuels it needs, rather than diversifying import sources that are creating new dependencies. Every building renovated, renewable project connected, heat pump installed and investment in grids, storage or flexibility reduces Europe’s dependence, vulnerability and energy bill.
We call on Ministers to:
●Move energy security beyond an approach dominated by gas supply and storage and make structural fossil-gas demand reduction a core security objective. It should be accompanied by a clear and just pathway for the managed phase-out of fossil gas.
● Ensure energy partnerships with third countries should support this direction rather than create new fossil fuel dependencies. Cooperation with neighbouring and like-minded countries should prioritise renewable energy, electricity interconnection, grids, flexibility, energy efficiency, green technologies and sustainable supply chains, while avoiding new fossil infrastructure and long-term gas commitments that risk locking Europe into another generation of dependency.
● Fully implement the EU Methane Regulation, integrating methane abatement measures across the EU’s main gas suppliers could recover around 20 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas, otherwise lost in avoidable methane releases, leaks or venting and flaring events.
Europe faces a choice. We can continue responding to every geopolitical shock with emergency subsidies, new fossil fuel suppliers and short-term fixes, or tackle the structural vulnerability of our energy system.
The most durable way to make energy affordable is to reduce people’s exposure to volatile fossil-fuel prices. The most secure energy policy is one that ends Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels. And the strongest competitiveness strategy is one that gives households and businesses access to an efficient, flexible, affordable, and renewable energy.
We therefore call on Ministers in Dublin to put Europe firmly on this path: protect people now, accelerate energy savings, renewables and renewables-based electrification, and plan the phase-out of fossil fuel dependence.
Europe should make this fossil fuel crisis its last one.
Yours sincerely,
Chiara Martinelli, Director at Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe