{"id":25883,"date":"2026-04-14T06:29:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T06:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/25883\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T06:29:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T06:29:12","slug":"e500m-per-day-europe-counts-the-cost-of-indecision-over-energy-euobserver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/25883\/","title":{"rendered":"\u20ac500m\u00a0per day: Europe counts the cost of indecision over energy \u2013 EUobserver"},"content":{"rendered":"

EUobserver voice is a daily opinion piece by EUobserver staff writers, published every weekday morning.<\/p>\n

\u20ac500m\u00a0per day is the extra cost of the Iran war to\u00a0the EU\u2019s energy bill. <\/p>\n

The bloc has spent an\u00a0additional\u00a0\u20ac22bn since the start of the US-Israeli airstrikes against Tehran, according to the European Commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has already confirmed her conversion to nuclear energy. <\/p>\n

Abandoning nuclear was a \u201cstrategic mistake\u201d,\u00a0she said last month.\u00a0In a speech on Monday<\/a> (13 April), she said that renewables and\u00a0nuclear\u00a0would be at the heart of weaning Europe off its dependency on oil and gas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Without their own oil and gas reserves \u2013 and with fracking having been ruled out a decade ago because of the environmental damage it causes\u00a0\u2014 the EU-27 are particularly vulnerable to oil price shocks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many of the measures discussed by von der Leyen on Monday are either too small in scale or too slow.\u00a0EU-wide coordination of member states\u2019 gas storage filling\u00a0and oil releases will help a bit but\u00a0won\u2019t\u00a0cushion governments for\u00a0very long.\u00a0Subsidising consumer energy bills, as the EU did in 2022 following Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, is\u00a0probably necessary\u00a0to reduce the chances of a recession. <\/p>\n

But, again,\u00a0how long can finance ministries foot the extra bill?\u00a0Several African countries, including Tanzania and Kenya, are\u00a0already bracing their people for 30-percent price hikes at the pump.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is a certain irony to von der Leyen\u2019s conversion to nuclear, 15 years after being a minister in the Angela Merkel that\u00a0basically mothballed\u00a0Germany\u2019s nuclear reactors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The commission is expected to green light France\u2019s plan to build six new reactors at\u00a0a\u00a0cost of\u00a0\u20ac70bn, while a handful of other EU states are now unpicking their own legal moratoriums on nuclear energy. <\/p>\n

But\u00a0the\u00a0new reactors\u00a0in France, which has the biggest nuclear sector in Europe,\u00a0won\u2019t\u00a0be operational\u00a0for at least a decade.\u00a0The likes of Italy and Belgium, who are currently re-opening their energy laws, would have to wait longer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps Europe\u2019s\u00a0greatest energy policy failure in the past 15 years is that it has been too slow, too\u00a0reactive\u00a0and too indecisive.\u00a0In the US, the Obama,\u00a0Trump\u00a0and Biden administrations gave\u00a0fracking\u00a0the green light. The US is now a\u00a0major\u00a0energy exporter again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By scrapping nuclear and half-heartedly embracing renewables, the EU left itself\u00a0at the mercy of Russia and the Middle East.\u00a0And now, for the second time in four years,\u00a0it\u00a0faces a hefty bill.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EUobserver voice is a daily opinion piece by EUobserver staff writers, published every weekday morning. \u20ac500m\u00a0per day is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[137],"tags":[280,7725,12832,408,7723,12830,406,7724,12831,407,403],"class_list":["post-25883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ursula-von-der-leyen","tag-typedefinedterm","tag-identifier26","tag-identifier4420","tag-identifier4599","tag-nameafrica","tag-nameenergy","tag-nameeuobserver-voice","tag-termcodeafrica","tag-termcodeenergy","tag-termcodeeuobserver-voice","tag-ursula-von-der-leyen"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116401652646648618","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}