The European Union has taken a step forward in freeing itself from its dependence on Russian imports of fossil fuels and diversifying its energy supply.
Representatives from the European Parliament and the EU Council reached a provisional agreement early in the morning on Wednesday, which allows EU countries to add a RepowerEU chapter to their national recovery and resilience plans for the period after COVID.
RepowerEU is a plan presented by the Commission in May in response to Moscow’s war against Ukraine to use 225 billion euros in unused money originally earmarked to help the bloc’s economies recover from their COVID slump to accelerate the energy transition and diversify energy supplies outside Russia.
The deal will enable the bloc’s capitals to obtain key funding for key investments and reforms to support the energy transition and increased resilience of the EU energy system.
“We have kept our promises: RepowerEU will come into force at the beginning of next year. We successfully completed the negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council yesterday evening,” said Siegfried Mureşan, Deputy Chairman of the EPP Group for Budget and Structural Policy and one of the key negotiators.
“With 20 billion euros in new funding, RepowerEU will help Member States reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels. It will also speed up the transition to renewable energy.”
New and existing reforms and investments, which are set out in Member States’ reconstruction plans from February 1, 2022 — the start of the war in Ukraine — are financed by RepowerEU. These measures must be aimed at tackling energy poverty among vulnerable households and small and medium-sized enterprises.
Around 30 percent of the funds included in the RepowerEU plan are used for cross-border projects, as the EU wants to create a highly independent and autonomous “energy union.”
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Romanian MEP Dragoș Pîslaru (Renew) described the agreed plan as “an instrument that has three main components: ambition, transparency and flexibility.”
“It is a moment of enormous ambition on the part of the EU to identify and provide the means to become vigorously independent from one door to another, from a neighbour to a bakery on the street corner,” he added.
“RepowerEU is the solution that our citizens, our companies and our generations need to overcome this energy crisis and cut their energy costs. And today I can proudly say that we did it!
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