European Union President Ursula von der Leyen said that the ongoing conflict with Iran provides Europe with an opportunity to revisit green and renewable energy sources.
“The Strait of Hormuz is essentially closed, and immediately citizens feel the impact at the gas station, in the supermarket and on the household bills. So what we are seeing in the Middle East is not some distant crisis, but in a world in which everything is connected, the effects are direct and they are immediate and this is, as I said, the second fossil fuel crisis in just a few years,” von der Leyen said. “There’s one thing that all these events make clear we are paying a very high price for our overdependency on fossil fuels and the grim reality for our continent is fossil fuel energy will remain the most expensive option in the years to come.”
“But on the other hand, we also have assets. Europe has assets,” she continued. “We have the electricity that is produced in Europe from renewables and from nuclear. Therefore, our strategy to decarbonize has not only been confirmed in the last years, but is growing in importance day by day.”
“And our objective is clear: we need to scale up the homegrown, affordable, reliable energy. That is the wide range of renewables we have, but it is also the nuclear energy of course, because they give us independence, predictability and energy security,” von der Leyen further explained. “The only lasting way out of the fossil dependency is to modernize by shifting electricity generation to renewables and nuclear, and by electrifying the economy as rapidly as possible.”
According to the European Commission’s page on renewable energy, Europe aims to “achieve its renewables target of at least 42.5%, but aiming for 45%, by 2030.”
