The EU has reached a provisional deal on the Net-Zero industry Act to bolster EU production in technologies needed for decarbonisation.

The Net-Zero industry Act is widely seen as a counter to the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and sets a target for the EU to produce 40 per cent of its annual deployment needs in net-zero technologies by 2030 and to capture 15 per cent of the global market value for these technologies.

MEPs secured an approach based on a single list of technologies to be supported, including all renewable technologies, nuclear, industrial decarbonisation, grid, energy storage technologies, and biotech.

National support schemes aiming to speed up the deployment of technologies among households and consumers (such as solar panels, heat pumps) will have to take into account sustainability and resilience criteria, the text says. Public procurement procedures and auctions to deploy renewable energy sources should also meet such criteria, albeit under conditions to be defined by the Commission, and for a minimum of 30 per cent of the volume auctioned per year in the member state, or alternatively for a maximum of six GW auctioned per year and per country.

A supply will be considered as not resilient when the proportion of a specific net-zero technology originating in a non-EU country accounts for more than half of the supply of that specific net-zero technology within the Union.

The agreement comes as a new EU climate target of a 90 per cent cut of all greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 has been announced. Based on a 1990n baseline, the target is, for the moment, non-binding and no attempt to ratify it will be made ahead of the elections to the European Parliament, as the Commission is wished to avoid it becoming a political issue.

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