The European Commission has a bold new plan to end Europe's crippling dependence on imported fossil fuels. The centerpiece of that plan is a binding electrification target for 2040. The target itself, per a leaked draft, is currently blank. Not metaphorically. Literally blank.
The Plan With a Hole Where the Numbers Should Be
EUobserver got hold of a leaked draft of the European Commission's Electrification Action Plan, set to be officially unveiled on July 17. The document is ambitious, sweeping, and notably missing one fairly important detail: the actual target it's supposed to be built around.
According to the draft, Brussels intends to propose a binding electrification target later this year as part of a wider post-2030 energy package. The space where that target will eventually live is, at the time of the leak, empty. Which is a bit like announcing your diet plan and leaving the calorie goals as a fill-in-the-blank for sometime after lunch.
To be fair, this is how EU policy sausage often gets made. Draft, leak, debate, revise, water down, repeat. But the optics of a document whose central promise is literally unwritten do not exactly project the urgency the moment calls for.
What €50 Billion in Pain Actually Buys You
The commission is not wrong about the problem. The draft states plainly that "the recent crisis in the Middle East showed for the second time in five years the risks of the EU's dependency on imported fossil fuels." EUobserver reports the document cites an extra €50 billion the EU spent on fossil fuel imports during the 111-day crisis.
Fifty billion euros. In roughly three and a half months. For fuel Europe did not need to import at anything close to crisis-tier prices if it had moved faster on alternatives over the past decade. That is not an abstraction. That is real money that left the European economy and went somewhere else, funding someone else's priorities, because Europe is still, in 2026, enormously exposed every time a region with oil or gas has a bad week.
The commission estimates that faster electrification could replace roughly two-thirds of EU gas demand and cut oil consumption in half by 2040. If those numbers are even half right, the potential savings run to around €200 billion over the period. That is the argument for doing this urgently. Whether Brussels can actually move urgently is a very different question.
Twenty-Three Percent. For a Decade. While Asia Lapped Them
Here is the number that should embarrass someone in Brussels: electricity currently accounts for just 23 percent of the EU's final energy consumption. According to EUobserver's reporting on the draft, that figure has barely moved in a decade, despite renewable power capacity growing substantially across the continent. Europe has been building solar and wind at a decent clip. It just has not been converting that electricity into actual end use across transport, heating, and industry at anything like the required rate.
The draft points out, apparently without irony, that China, Japan, and South Korea have all already surpassed the 30 percent electrification mark. China. A country the EU regularly lectures about clean energy transitions. And when you zoom out further, Europe's electrification rate has barely shifted since the early 1990s. The continent got mobile phones, the internet, two decades of renewable energy subsidies, and managed to hold its electrification rate essentially flat across thirty-plus years.
The commission's draft identifies high electricity prices as one of the primary barriers to people actually switching to heat pumps, electric vehicles, and other electrified alternatives. Which is accurate, and also a problem the EU has been saying it needs to fix for most of the past decade.
What Brussels Actually Wants to Do About It
The Electrification Action Plan frames faster electrification as a matter of EU sovereignty, competitiveness, and energy security. That framing is deliberate. Sovereignty and security sell better in member-state capitals than climate targets do right now, and the commission knows it.
According to EUobserver, the commission wants member states to reduce the relative cost of electricity compared to fossil fuels, specifically to make electrified options like heat pumps and EVs genuinely price-competitive. That sounds simple. It is not. Electricity prices in Europe are driven by a tangle of grid infrastructure costs, taxes, levies, and market design decisions that vary wildly from country to country.
The full action plan drops on July 17. The binding target itself comes later, as part of a post-2030 energy package. So the timeline here is: announce the plan, unveil the plan without a target, set the target at some unspecified later point, and then somehow hit it by 2040. The runway is shorter than it looks.
The Dingo Take
Look, the European Commission is not wrong about what needs to happen. Electrification is the move. Getting off imported fossil fuels is both an economic and security imperative that two separate crises in five years have made impossible to ignore. The analysis in this draft, from what EUobserver has reported, is solid. The problem is that solid analysis and actual policy change are two entirely different things in Brussels.
Europe has had the analysis for years. The electrification rate has been stuck at 23 percent for a decade while China blew past 30. The EU has been saying it needs to make electricity cheaper relative to gas for basically the entire post-2022 energy crisis era. The answer to "why hasn't it happened" is not that nobody wrote a document explaining why it should. There is no shortage of documents.
So fine, July 17, we will see the plan. And then sometime later this year, we will see what number they eventually write into the blank. And then we will find out whether member states actually implement it or treat it the way they have treated every previous energy efficiency and electrification commitment. The EU spent €50 billion extra during a 111-day crisis that should never have hurt this much. If that is not enough to finally move the needle, it is hard to know what will be.
