This week the European Sustainable Energy Week turned twenty. Since 2006 it has grown into Europe’s biggest annual event on the clean energy transition: more than 10,000 people, policymakers, businesses, researchers, civil society, younger and less young leaders, entrepreneurs, plus those following online. After two days there, I am more convinced than ever that this community holds something it too rarely allows itself: success stories worth telling.

What’s the story?

I had the pleasure of joining the EUFORES panel (the European Forum for Renewable Energy Sources, the network of European and national parliamentarians working on this agenda) in the debate “What’s the story? New narratives for the energy transition,” held on the occasion of the presentation of the excellent EEW5 final report on the very same subject. This is not just about communication: it is the way we talk about the transition that decides whether citizens, businesses and governments back it or resist it. We should tell it, with more confidence and more enthusiasm, for what it is: a radical change, yes, but also the most rational economic and energy agenda we have, in a time of climate emergency and geopolitical turmoil. Renewables, batteries and energy efficiency are allies in the same fight against our dependence on fossil fuels. True, solar panels and wind turbines stand in the spotlight far more often than the technologies that reduce energy needs in the first place; yet the cheapest, cleanest and most secure unit of energy is the one we never need to use: the gas we never import, the bill that never arrives. And it is a field where Europe leads, with companies, jobs and know-how, here and now.

On the panel I was asked which counter-narratives I run into most often. I named three. The first is Brussels as the scapegoat: whatever goes wrong is blamed on European rules, even where the real cause of most of our energy troubles is dependence on imported gas. The second is Europe as a cash machine, the idea that the EU should bankroll national governments’ policies without conditions; but European funds should serve common objectives, not be handouts, and if well spent they could be the largest investment ever made in our productive systems. The third is nuclear as an effective way to cut energy prices and break free from fossil fuels: of the three, this is the counter-truth that puzzles me most. Everyone now admits it: no new reactor will produce a kilowatt-hour for fifteen or twenty years and at a very high cost, while we need to bring bills down now. And in a system with high shares of distributed renewables, what we need is flexibility: storage, demand response, grids  not rigid, centralised baseload.

Twenty years, four Commissioners, one framework

One of the most interesting moments of this anniversary edition brought together on the same stage the people who have shaped Europe’s energy policy over the past two decades: former Commissioners Andris Piebalgs (2004-2009), Günther Oettinger (2010-2014), Miguel Arias Cañete (2014-2019) and Kadri Simson (2019-2024), alongside the current Commissioner for Energy and Housing, Dan Jørgensen. It was a lively, at times moving debate: each recalled the difficult moments and the successes that, together, traced Europe’s path toward the climate leadership many have come to recognise in it. I was especially glad to hear Andris Piebalgs again. In 2009, with Claude Turmes, he had the vision to bring business leaders together to show that energy efficiency is not only good for the climate but essential to Europe’s energy security and competitiveness. It was their intuition that led to the creation of the European Alliance to Save Energy, which I have had the honour of chairing ever since; it was Andris who suggested I take up this cause. As Europe accelerates electrification and strengthens its security, competitiveness and strategic autonomy, energy efficiency must stay at the centre of the discussion: that, in the end, is the core of our work.

What struck me most, listening to the five Commissioners, was that, despite the differences of style, era and political family  one coherent thread ran through every account: the continuity guaranteed by a shared European framework of rules and targets, and by a Commission willing to define and lead it. It is that framework that turned twenty years of shifting, often dramatic circumstances into a coherent direction of travel. And it is exactly what risks being lost today: not through a frontal attack, but through slow erosion; through internal divisions within the Commission, through the pressure of wealthy fossil lobbies and of political forces intent on weakening the European project and dividing its peoples. Binding targets watered down into recommendations; deadlines slipping “to protect competitiveness” while in fact favouring incumbents and those unwilling to change; key laws reopened before they have even been implemented, as now risks happening with the renewables and efficiency directives. The danger is not one dramatic repeal of agreed targets: it is the many big and small concessions that, under the cover of “simplification,” make the rules uncertain for the investors, businesses and local administrators who rely on them  and with them, they jeopardize the credibility of Europe’s entire energy agenda. It is a process already under way, quiet and opaque. When the Commission makes “simplification” its priority and treats a few sectors tied to old models as its near-exclusive interlocutors, leaving behind the new value chains, but also civil society, cities and regions, it ends up validating the mistaken idea that the Green Deal was a mistake to be “corrected,” and hands precious ammunition to its own opponents. Yet the illegal war waged by the United States and Israel against the bloodthirsty dictatorship of the Iranian Pasdaran shows precisely the opposite: dependence on fossil fuels weighs heavily on our economies and, above all, on the poorest countries and social groups. Electrification, renewables, batteries and energy efficiency are already today the best defence the EU can build and its single biggest competitive advantage.

The people who actually deliver it

If the Commissioners’ panel reminded us of the journey of sustainable energy in Europe, the EU Sustainable Energy Awards awards ceremony put a face to those who actually walk it. On the opening morning of EUSEW, the EU Sustainable Energy Awards were presented in three categories: SMEs Driving Energy Efficiency, Local Energy Action and Women in Energy. This year I served on the High-Level Jury together with Tomas Häyry, Mayor of Vaasa, and Joanna Pandera, Founder and President of Forum Energii. We assessed the finalists across all three categories together; on stage we each presented one, and I had the honour of presenting the award for SMEs Driving Energy Efficiency, a brand-new category awarded for the first time this year. The ceremony was hosted by the new Director-General for Energy, Céline Gauer, with Paloma Aba Garrote, Director of CINEA: a lot of women on that EUSEW stage, and that is a good thing!

The winner was a Belgian project: RE-LEAF: Affordable Renovation, in Limburg. On the jury, we admired its intelligent simplicity. RE-LEAF tackles energy poverty by building professional renovation advice directly into mortgage planning. Working with Onesto and Energiehuis Limburg, and funded by the EU LIFE Programme, it lets home-buyers assess the upgrades they need, their cost and their savings before they take out a mortgage: the renovations cut energy use by 40% to 60% or more, lower bills and improve comfort, while raising property values by up to 15%. Having guided 59 homeowners through a successful pilot, RE-LEAF is now scaling across all Flemish provinces and, I hope, well beyond. The real obstacle for SMEs is precisely growing and finding the financial support to do so; it is no accident that so many ideas born in Europe end up moving to the United States.

The winners of the other two categories are no less remarkable. In Local Energy Action, the City of Vienna’s “100 Projects Phasing Out Gas” is driving the city towards fully renewable heating and cooling by 2040: 1,030 gas boilers already replaced with renewable systems, over 2,300 tonnes of CO₂ saved, and each conversion turned into transferable knowledge. The Women in Energy award went to Donna Gartland, CEO of Dublin’s energy agency Codema, for leading Ireland’s first large-scale district heating scheme, which recovers waste heat from data centres  and for building a workplace where 53% of staff and 58% of senior leadership are women.

The next generation in the room

One last part of these days gave me real hope: the time spent with the Young Energy Ambassadors. Each year the Commission selects thirty professionals aged 18 to 35 from across Europe for a one-year mandate; the 2026 cohort spans twenty-five countries, from PhD researchers to entrepreneurs. I had the pleasure of speaking with three of them: Antoine Ferraris, who works on corporate affairs at Wien Energie and represented Austria’s youth at the UN climate COPs; Giulia Marzetti, a chemical engineer formerly at the European Commission, who now advises on decarbonisation and hosts the fine podcast Sostenibilità Italiana; and Raúl Berganza Gómez, Spanish and seven years in Germany, whose grandparents built his country’s first hydropower plants and who now works on the energy demand of artificial intelligence. Different countries, different paths, the same seriousness of purpose, the same open smiles and a fine, contagious energy. If their drive is any sign of what is coming, they may well reinvigorate some of our leaders. This, too, is a European story worth telling.

What EUSEW does best is bring together those who make the transition and those who write its rules. RE-LEAF, Vienna, Donna Gartland and these young ambassadors are not promises about the future: they are evidence from the present: they renovate homes, replace boilers, recover wasted heat, create jobs, build communities and culture, invent workable solutions, now. This is where we must start again: claim what has been achieved, protect what made it possible, accelerate. The success is real, the numbers are on our side. Weakening the European framework would be the costliest mistake of all. The cheapest, cleanest energy is still the energy of wind and sun, and the energy we don’t waste or manage to store — and, increasingly, it is also the most European.