EU Electric Strategy: Europe Turns to Power Imports to Fuel Its Green Transition

Brussels is resetting the Green Deal’s course—centering the transition on power-market rules and grid build-out to keep prices stable, shield industry, and scale electrification. It dovetails with a new international strategy linking climate ambition to competitiveness and security, and hints at more steps beyond the 2024 market-design reform. Yet one question looms: in the race to deliver, does mixing energy goals with foreign-policy ambitions store up trouble?

By Paolo Licandro

6 MINUTES READ

The European Commission is preparing a quiet but consequential recalibration of the energy transition: an electricity-first strategy that leans on power-market rules, interconnections, and flexibility to keep the Green Deal deliverable.

The driver is as simple as it is uncomfortable: ambition has outpaced execution. National inertia, slow consumer uptake, and an industrial base squeezed by the loss of cheap energy have exposed the limits of “from carbon to electron by 2035” unless the system becomes faster, more robust, and more predictable.

Yet there are signs that the new strategy—presented by Kaja Kallas on 23 October 2025, rather than the Energy Commissioner—could prove fatal for Europe’s power system and, by extension, its economy.