On Friday 19 September, EuropeOn’s Secretary General, Julie Beaufils, joined a high-level industry roundtable bringing together 45 organisations from across the energy and clean-tech value chains. The event, chaired by the new European Commission Director-General for Energy, Céline Gauer, focused on accelerating clean-tech deployment in Europe,.

The roundtable was one of a series of exchanges through which the Director-General has engaged around 100 stakeholders in recent weeks, alongside a parallel roundtable with energy-intensive industries.

No clean-tech without qualified hands

Participants highlighted some common priorities during the roundtable, such as the key role of accelerating electrification, or the need for regulatory stability. In this context, Julie Beaufils  brought one message that cut across all of them: all the clean technologies discussed around the table (heat pumps, photovoltaics, EV chargers and more) all depend on one thing to actually reach end-users: a qualified electrical workforce, in sufficient numbers.

With 2.7 million professionals, our sector is the “last link” that brings clean tech into people’s homes and businesses. Yet we are still too few hands to plug into the challenge: that is why the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy should treat qualified installation capacity as an integral part of its clean-tech deployment planning and its energy-security agenda.

In her final remarks, Director-General Céline Gauer acknowledged that electrician and installer shortages are a big part of the equation.

This exchange was a great occasion to, once again, put the focus on the skilled professionals making electrification happen. We look forward to more opportunities to engage with policymakers and discuss on how to make Europe more sustainable and resilient.