Net-Zero Industry Act: Our joint reaction in response to Mr. Ehler’s report

EASE, together with 10 other European Climate and Clean Tech Groups call on the European Parliament to keep the Net-Zero Industry Act true to its purpose of scaling up clean technologies across Europe. A joint reaction is published today to raise immediate concerns over the significant change of direction the draft report of Rapporteur Ehler suggests for the NZIA.

The leading European associations supporting this statement include EASE, SolarPower Europe, WindEurope, E.DSO, Europacable, EHPA, T&D Europe, CurrENT, Flow Batteries Europe, Transport & Environment, and Renewable Hydrogen Coalition.

Our main concerns are that widening the scope of the Act to ‘any technology’ under the Taxonomy risk:

• Diluting the attention from the core purpose of the Net-Zero Industry Act to scale up clean technologies across Europe
• Reinforce existing challenges clean tech manufacturers currently face, such as rising energy, input costs and extra-EU imports
• Divert the NZIA objective to support the significant investment needed to ensure global competitiveness for critical mass-manufactured clean energy technologies.

We strongly believe strategic Net Zero technologies, as outlined in the European Commission proposed Annex, should remain the priority focus of the NZIA targets and provisions.

To this end, we call on the European Parliament to avoid significant widening of the NZIA scope, to ‘make Europe the home of clean tech’ as Commission’s President von der Leyen called for earlier this year.