President Trump’s positions and policies, combined with record coal consumption and booming global electricity demand, geo-economic confrontation, and widespread concerns about energy security, are changing the game when it comes to understanding realistic decarbonization trajectories. The war in Europe is intensifying competition between defense and transition budgets. This is also the case elsewhere in the world.

Facing multiple crises, the European Commission (EC), backed by European Union (EU) Member States, has embarked on a pathway to accelerate the decarbonization of the EU energy system, while fostering its resilience and accelerating the roll out of hydrogen and derivative by-products.

The German manufacturing industry at the heart of the German economic activity has been confronted in the past years with conjunctural shocks, which question its existence on the German territory: the energy transition which hinders it in the short term to resort to fossile energy from Germany and nuclear energy; a questioning of fossile energy imports from Russia which keeps production sites of fossile energy and nuclear energy in Germany; the currently small capacity of renewable energy to satisfy the important energy needs of the manufacturing industry and the putting into place of alternatives to the importation of energy resources.

Only eight years are left to expand by almost three times the current total installed wind and solar energy capacity in the European Union (EU) in adding around 600 gigawatts (GW), and so reach the highly-ambitious 2030 targets. This requires a mobilization whose scale is immense – amidst times of unprecedented crises and uncertainties.