European Commission releases Net-Zero Industry Act

The European Commission has unveiled its Net-Zero Industry Act, a long-awaited proposal aiming at boosting Europe’s green industry.

The proposed regulation is a key part of the European Green Deal Industrial Plan — the bloc’s response to Washington’s massive green subsidies package — and aims to ensure that at least 40 per cent of the bloc’s demand for cleantech is made domestically by 2030, Politico reports.

The proposal sets out targets for technologies deemed necessary to decarbonize the bloc’s economy, a move aimed at preventing the EU from deepening its reliance on third countries like China.

"If we want to get to climate neutrality as we plan in 2050 and if you want to use all the opportunities this industrial revolution is throwing at us and ward off the challenges ... we will need a massive scale-up of clean tech manufacturing," Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans told reporters.

Talks on the proposal went down to the wire, as commissioners sought to resolve a fight over whether to include nuclear energy.

The final text is ambiguous. Nuclear energy is not included in a list of “strategic net-zero technologies” — detailed in an annexe to the legal text — that can benefit from faster permitting and easier access to funding.

But elsewhere in the text, a formal definition of net-zero technologies includes "advanced technologies to produce energy from nuclear processes with minimal waste from the fuel cycle" and "small modular reactors".

Among the technologies designated as "strategic" are solar photovoltaic, onshore and offshore wind, battery and storage, heat pumps and geothermal energy, electrolyzers and fuel cells, biomethane, carbon capture and storage and grid technologies.

The Commission today also released its Critical Raw Materials Act proposal — which aims to shore up the bloc's supply of the critical minerals needed to build green tech — and a proposal for a European Hydrogen Bank, which aims to boost renewable hydrogen production and imports.