EuropeOn recently released its own Manifesto to outline our sectors key asks for the next EU legislature, ahead of the EU elections taking place in early June. It was thus time to discuss our asks and the contents of our Manifesto with policymakers up for re-election and who will be responsible for making the European Green Deal a reality.
To this end, we invited our members to Brussels for direct exchanges with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and Commission representatives, where they could highlight why our common asks are relevant at the national level.
We started the day with MEP Jutta Paulus (Greens, Germany), with whom we mainly discussed how the implementation of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) should support our asks for workforce and skills. Indeed, the EED has two key provisions, namely to assess the gap between available and needed professionals and to work on an attractiveness campaign, that could be instrumental to address the workforce dimension of our Manifesto.
We stayed on the EED with our next guest: Margot Pinault from the Commission’s energy efficiency unit. We presented our two upcoming reports (watch this space!) for the implementation of the two aforementioned provisions and discussed how stakeholders at EU and national level can support their implementation.
Later in the day, we met with Ville Niinistö (Greens, Finland), with whom we clearly shared a vision of a decarbonised and electrified Europe, for the benefit of our citizens, climate and economy. We then highlighted the need to work on the workforce dimension of climate and energy policy to align this critical enabler with our objectives.
We then met with Nicolás González Casares and went over how our manifesto relates to his achievements on the Renewable Energy Directive and the Electricity Market Design. We all agreed on the need to electrify further and on the essential role of electrical constructors and installers in this regard.
