Clean Industrial Deal

100% renewables

Energy costs burden citizens as well as Europe’s industry. The European Commission’s Clean Industrial Deal wants to boost businesses by giving them access to cheap renewable energy. Only by leaving fossil fuels behind them, energy-intensive industries can remain competitive. In this dossier we show how EU policies could pave the way for a fast transition to renewables that lowers both the bills of households and industries. We discuss how to prepare energy networks and markets for a fully renewable energy system, in brief: the most promising pathway to respecting the Paris Agreement.

Industrial policy

The Clean Industrial Deal signals the emergence of a European Industrial Policy, a shift from the EU's traditional focus on competition and market integration, with a skeptical stance towards government intervention. This raises key questions: How must EU institutions evolve to support this policy? What tools are available to implement it? How can strategies be tailored to address the diverse needs of different industrial sectors? Discover these issues as Europe navigates this new direction.

Trade partnerships

The EU’s Clean Industrial Deal marks a pivotal shift in aligning climate ambition with industrial strategy—embedding trade, raw materials access, and subsidy reform at its core. But this recalibration has global implications. Through mechanisms like CBAM, critical raw material partnerships and the new Clean Trade and Investment Partnerships (CTIPs), the EU increasingly externalizes aspects of its green transition, raising urgent questions about fairness, especially for countries in the Global South. This dossier explores how the EU’s evolving external partnerships reflect its geopolitical posture, and how more inclusive, cooperative frameworks could mitigate unintended spillovers while advancing both environmental justice and global climate resilience.

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