The Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament welcome the fact that in 2020, 38% of the EU’s electricity came from renewable sources, thus overtaking the fossil fuels for the first time as the EU’s primary power source. Yet, the S&D Group is convinced this positive trend should come hand in hand with efforts on both European and national levels for making renewable energy affordable to citizens. This is the position the Socialists and Democrats expressed in the plenary of the European Parliament during the debate with the European Commission on the state of the Energy Union.
 
Mohammed Chahim, MEP and S&D vice-president responsible for the energy aspects of the Green Deal, said:
 
“The importance of the clean energy transition not only lies in mitigating climate change, but is also heavily linked to decreasing the EU’s energy dependence and increasing its energy security.
 
“We need to reduce our energy dependency and increase energy security by cutting down energy imports, eliminating subsidies for climate and environmentally harmful energy sources, and by taking a leading role in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
 
“With renewable energy from solar and wind now being the cheapest sources of energy, a successful energy transition will also contribute to combatting energy poverty.”
 
Dan Nica, MEP and S&D spokesperson in the committee on industry, research and energy, said:
 
“According to the latest data from the Commission, we still have 31 million people living in a condition of energy poverty. There figures are likely to dramatically climb due to the energy prices crisis. The figures on energy poverty and on the impact of the energy crisis in the last couple of months show huge territorial disparities, mostly affecting countries highly reliant on fossil fuels.
 
“This is why we believe that the energy prices crisis should not lower the EU’s ambitions of fighting climate change. To the contrary, we need to massively invest in energy efficiency and renewables, which will not only reduce emissions, but also drive down and stabilise the energy prices and reduce the EU’s energy dependency vis à vis third countries.
 
“As we saw in the last few months, a continued high reliance on imports of fossil fuels exposes the Union’s economy to global price fluctuations. Our parliamentary group has no doubts in the need to improve resilience, energy security and safety and in integrating more decentralised renewable energy throughout the EU. While we welcome the actions taken by the European Commission, such as the recent toolbox for tackling rising energy prices and key legislative proposals, we stress that effective preparedness for possible shocks is a constant need and the Commission should be better preparing this.”