Seda Orhan, head of energy at CAN, agreed. “The acceleration of renewables should be coupled with the acceleration of energy efficiency, but also the phasing out of fossil gas,” she said.
But building the wind and solar farms, nuclear plants and electricity networks that are needed — not to mention replacing dirty old fossil-fuel powered equipment with electrified cars, heat pumps, factories and smelters — will take not weeks or months but decades, and will cost trillions of euros.
Double down on fossil fuels
For those willing to put catastrophic climate change out of mind, there’s another option — more, cheaper fossil fuels.
EU officials hope that ongoing efforts to diversify fossil fuel supplies, set out well before the war over Iran, will help the bloc avert supply issues and steeper prices.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EU has rushed to diversify its energy supplies by relying more heavily on Norway, North Africa and Central Asia. Only this week, Dan Jørgensen, the EU’s energy chief, visited Azerbaijan to shore up a tentative gas deal, which he hailed as a win for energy security.
This all comes as Norway, the biggest supplier of gas to the bloc, expands its own drilling operations, and the U.K. faces pressure to ramp up drilling in the North Sea.