€340 billion. That is how much Europe’s fossil fuel bill for 2025 has cost; and that’s already €24 billion more than at the start of the war in the Middle East, in less than two months.

Just like four years ago, here we are watching gas prices soar and household and business bills rise once again. This is the second ‘fossil fuel’ crisis in four years. And proof that those who promise us energy security by buying more gas, more oil and more imported fuels are telling us a fairy tale. Fossil fuels still account for 57% of Europe’s energy needs. For Italy, which imports almost everything it burns, the figure rises to 75%.

On 22 April, Earth Day, the European Commission responded with AccelerateEU. A fairly effective title for a document that takes the right view: energy security is not built by chasing gas prices; it is built by moving away from fossil fuels. In a Europe where half the continent has gone back to saying that the transition costs too much and can be postponed, this sentence, in black and white in the Commission’s documents, is worth more than many declarations of principle. The Green Deal was and is the right choice. AccelerateEU confirms this.

The plan sets out concrete targets. One hundred gigawatts of renewables per year across the Union. Storage capacity almost quadrupled by 2030, because without batteries we cannot use the midday sun in the evening. Four million heat pumps per year to replace gas boilers. A third of final energy consumption electrified by 2030. One hundred billion for industrial decarbonisation. And the revival of the proposal to stop taxing electricity more heavily than gas. Today in Europe, anyone who replaces their boiler with a heat pump is penalised fiscally. As if electricity, which we can produce from the sun, wind and water, were more polluting than gas arriving from Algeria, Qatar or the United States. The Commission is attempting to reverse this situation, which is particularly acute in Italy, by proposing to apply the decision-making procedures set out for the electricity market, where decisions are taken by majority vote, because the European Energy Taxation Directive has been blocked since 2021 by the veto of certain Member States. We shall see if it succeeds.

Another key point is that AccelerateEU places energy efficiency at the heart of its last-minute ‘solutions’, which will be finalised by 13 May: the cheapest, safest and most genuinely European energy is… the energy we do not consume. It doesn’t depend on the Strait of Hormuz, it doesn’t require new power stations, and it doesn’t send bills soaring every time there’s a war on the other side of the world. Insulating a home, replacing an old boiler, installing a heat pump: these are measures that reduce bills today and for good. The legislative tools are already in place: the Energy Efficiency Directive, the Buildings Directive, and Ecodesign. But governments are delaying the implementation of the rules: to give just one example, 19 Member States are before the Court of Justice for failing to transpose, or inadequately transposing, the Energy Efficiency Directive. Yet the measures work: if we hadn’t applied EE rules and measures in recent years, we would need 31% more energy today!

Then there is Italy. We ended 2025 with 83 gigawatts of installed renewables, a portfolio built up over twenty years. But new installations have fallen by 8% compared to 2024, the first decline after four years of growth. Residential solar fell by 32%, commercial solar by 26%, wind power by 8% and hydroelectric power by 22%. This is no coincidence. It is the result of specific policy choices: the abrupt end of the Superbonus, which has not been replaced by a sustainable and accessible incentive scheme; the ‘eligible areas’ decree, which has shifted the responsibility onto the regions to decide where renewable energy installations can and cannot be built; the agriculture decree, which has banned ground-mounted solar panels even on low-yield land; and a regulatory framework that changes every six months and has driven investors away. Whilst Europe is asking us for 100 GW a year, we are producing 6 GW and slowing down. Europe is not the problem. It is those who have an interest in continuing to profit from our dependence.

On 18 March, a few days before the publication of AccelerateEU, Giorgia Meloni, along with nine other leaders – from Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary – signed a letter to EU leaders calling for a fundamental review of the ETS: an extension of free allowances beyond 2034, a postponement of the phase-out, and greater flexibility. A letter that aims to undermine one of the most effective tools the EU has ever deployed to reduce emissions (-50% compared to 2005 in the sectors covered) and to finance the transition (260 billion raised from auctions): Italy alone has accumulated 18 billion in ETS revenues that should have gone towards supporting industries in the transition, but which have been swallowed up by the public budget to the tune of over 90%; and in recent weeks, a full 300 million euros has been spent to fund the temporary reduction in excise duties: money raised to discourage the use of fossil fuels, yet now being used to fund them once again… . However, the Commission is not backing down for now, and AccelerateEU is not changing its stance on this either.

It should be noted, however, that not everything in AccelerateEU is convincing. The plan gives nuclear power a much larger role than was contained in the drafts leaked prior to publication. In addition to the usual praise for SMRs, there is talk of keeping power stations designed to last 40 years in service for up to 70, or even 80 years. But it will be far from easy. To extend the lifespan of French reactors to fifty years, EDF spent €49 billion on the ‘Grand Carénage’ programme. To extend them to 60 years, the French Court of Auditors estimates that €100 billion will be needed by 2035. As for reaching 80 years, it is unclear; it has never been done before.. And the risks are not theoretical: in the summer of 2022, France had to shut down 32 out of 56 reactors due to corrosion issues in welds that were thought to be safe: a net loss of €17.9 million for EDF in a single year. Furthermore, keeping old power stations running is a choice that diverts resources away from much more promising and immediate investments (renewables, grids, efficiency, storage).

Finally, there is the issue of state aid. In parallel with AccelerateEU, the Commission will present a proposal in the coming days to revise state aid rules, opening the door to temporary subsidies for the most exposed sectors: transport, fisheries, agriculture, fertilisers, and even gas-fired power generation. It claims these are emergency, temporary, and contingent measures. Understandable, in principle. But this is at odds with the priorities of AccelerateEU. Twenty-two out of twenty-seven countries have already spent over nine billion euros on 120 different measures. Spain has cut VAT from 21% to 10% on all forms of energy, including diesel. Germany has allocated 1.6 billion to fuel. Italy has spent 1 billion in forty days to reduce excise duties.

Most of these countries have opted for general, non-targeted measures: VAT and excise duty cuts that apply equally to everyone. They benefit those with a Porsche just as much as those with a Panda, those heating a country villa just as much as those living in a studio flat on the outskirts. Only eleven states have implemented measures genuinely aimed at vulnerable households. The result is doubly misguided: public money is being spent, most of which ends up in the pockets of those who need it least, and we are subsidising the very fossil fuel consumption that we should be reducing. During the 2022–2024 crisis, EU countries collectively burned through 2.2% of European GDP on support measures that were almost all uncoordinated and regressive. A costly lesson we have not really learnt.

Finally, in 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the REPowerEU provisions required a 15% cut in gas consumption within six months. Europe reduced it by 18%. It worked because there was a clear target, a deadline and shared responsibility. Today, faced with a crisis that is in many ways worse, AccelerateEU does not set binding targets and relies on a voluntary catalogue of best practices that energy ministers will discuss in Cyprus on 13 May, because it believes the conditions are not in place to approve them. The same reasoning underlies the refusal to support the proposal to tax energy companies’ windfall profits.

For all its limitations, AccelerateEU shows us that energy security in times of climate emergency and conflict is not a matter of choosing one fuel over another, but a complex system made up of various components. And the good news is that we know how to build it. Interconnected grids, storage, heat pumps, energy-efficient buildings, energy communities, and a tax system that rewards those who electrify rather than penalising them. Technologies that, for the most part, already exist, already work, and cost less than the gas we import. The problem is less and less about economics and technology and more about politics, especially in Italy.

Twenty years of Italian energy policy built on the implicit promise that gas would remain cheap are proving to be exactly what they are: a strategic error that, crisis after crisis, has always been dumped onto the same shoulders. Without adequate European tools and resources – such as a tax on fossil fuel windfall profits, a shared fund to combat energy poverty, binding efficiency targets, and so on – every crisis produces the same effect: it protects the wealthiest and prolongs our dependence on the fuels we should be phasing out.

Yet the facts are hard to ignore. The war in the Middle East reminds us, just as the war in Ukraine did four years ago, that the Green Deal was and is the right choice. Solutions exist and are within reach. Now we must decide to actually use them. Because every fossil fuel crisis we weather without reducing our dependence is a crisis we will pay for twice: with skyrocketing bills and a scorched earth.

Monica Frassoni

Brussels, 23 April 2026