By Ann Mettler
For a continent that aspired to become the world’s climate leader, Europe has comparatively little to show for the vast political and financial capital invested over the past decades. In an energy-poor geography facing a more unforgiving geopolitical landscape, Europe has allowed unpalatable dependencies to deepen—both on fossil fuels and on clean-tech manufacturing. Despite decades of targets, strategies, summits, and hundreds of billions of euros spent, Europe’s energy system remains one of its greatest strategic weaknesses.
It is time to admit a hard truth: more of the same will not deliver different results. Incremental adjustments at the margins will not suffice. What Europe needs is a strategic pivot – not away from clean energy ambitions, but toward a far more execution-focused, commercialization-minded approach commensurate with the scale of today’s existential challenges: security, competitiveness, and sovereignty.
These drivers may ultimately prove more powerful catalysts for change than climate ambition alone, while pointing in the same direction: deep decarbonization. A Europe that weans itself off fossil fuels—it is still importing roughly half of its energy in the form of oil and gas, a figure that has barely changed in over two decades—will regain agency and reduce exposure to economic coercion. Successfully phasing out Chinese components from critical energy infrastructure and scaling up domestic production and capacity would not only strengthen security, but also revive domestic manufacturing and leverage Europe’s purchasing power to spur innovation and job creation.
Critics will label this protectionism and warn of rising costs. But which major economy today is not actively backing its own industrial champions and technology leaders? Europe cannot expect its firms to succeed when burdened by the world’s highest and most volatile energy prices and competing against Chinese overcapacity, subsidies, and an uneven playing field.
For these reasons, Europe must rethink its ultimate objectives. Homegrown clean energy sources reduce exposure to coercion. Procurement from European firms and trusted allies reinforces democratic governance and rewards rule-based competition. Responding to China’s non-market prices by accounting for non-market costs borne by
Europe—loss of sovereignty, security risks, and erosion of industrial capacity and skills—would finally expose the fallacy of “cheap” imports that have proven exorbitantly expensive over time.
Taken together, these shifts could turn an unfinished energy transition into a triple win: greater resilience, stronger competitiveness, and deeper decarbonization.
First, Europe needs a new balance between public and private action. The scale of the energy transformation far exceeds what public budgets, or public sector technology expertise, can sustain alone. The state’s role must therefore be to enable and de-risk, not to micromanage. The transition should be public-sector enabled but private-sector driven, anchored in scalable projects, and clear pathways to profitability.
Second, Europe must learn to build big again. Not just patents, but first-of-a-kind projects. Not just pilots, but gigafactories made in Europe. Grid expansion, storage, interconnectors, and synthetic fuels are no longer optional—they are strategic imperatives. Without expedited permitting, resilient infrastructure, and profitable European companies, the transition will continue to stall regardless of legislative ambition. Systems thinking and coordinated policy planning must replace silos.
Third, Europe must stop confusing regulation with delivery. Climate ambition means little if nothing gets built. Success should be measured not in strategies published, but in factories opened, grids reinforced, supply chains diversified, and emissions reduced. Decarbonization through deindustrialization has already proven politically and economically corrosive – fuelling polarization and permanently destroying tens of thousands of jobs. An approach defined by excessive regulation, scarce and expensive energy, and a chronic inability to scale new technologies has run its course. It must urgently give way to something more pragmatic and productive.
Any credible strategy must start from Europe’s structural realities. For a continent without meaningful fossil fuel reserves, reducing consumption through efficiency, and innovative business models is not climate idealism, it is sound economics and necessary security policy. Yet this path carries its own risks. Greater electrification threatens to replace dependence on petro-states with dependence on the world’s first electro-state: China, which dominates solar panels, batteries, and critical minerals deeply embedded in Europe’s energy infrastructure.
Here, Europe’s rearmament presents an unexpected opportunity because much clean-energy and power technology is inherently dual-use. Cost will no longer be the sole criterion; supply chains and resilience will be assessed from the outset. Speed and urgency are built into the process. Energy security once meant security of supply. Today, it means avoiding excessive reliance on any single energy source or any single country. Diversification therefore becomes paramount.
This moment marks a rare inflection point for a long-overdue pivot. If seized, it could finally provide the strategic boost Europe’s energy transition has long lacked—serving security and resilience, competitiveness and industry, and yes, climate and decarbonization as well.
—-
The author is co-founder and President of Catalyse Europe, a new organization aiming to accelerate Europe’s transition to a clean-energy economy to ensure its long-term prosperity and security. She also serves on the board of the European Innovation Council and is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
