Europe didn’t discover its energy vulnerability in 2022. It had been warned for years. What changed was that the warning arrived in the form of a bill, and then another, and then a cold winter with gas reserves that might not last.
Russia’s decision to weaponise its gas exports was, in retrospect, the most consequential miscalculation it could have made. It handed Brussels a political mandate to do something it had been avoiding: build an energy system that didn’t depend on a single, hostile supplier.
REPowerEU, unveiled in May 2022, was the structural answer. Three years on, the results are concrete. Gas consumption across the bloc is down 13%. Renewable energy covered 25.2% of total EU energy consumption in 2024. Wind and solar together outproduced gas-fired generation for the first time ever. Under the revised Renewable Energy Directive agreed in late 2023, member states are now working toward a collective 42.5% renewable share by 2030, with an ambition to reach 45%.
The gas storage rules introduced in the same period turned a voluntary best-practice into an enforceable minimum. Storage facilities must reach 90% capacity before winter. Last autumn, they were at 95%, comfortably ahead of schedule. Demand reduction, agreed voluntarily at 15% below the pre-crisis average, became a habit more than a hardship for most member states.
New supply routes took shape with unusual speed. Agreements with Egypt, Israel, and Azerbaijan created flows that didn’t exist before 2022. LNG terminals were expanded. Pipeline interconnectors between Poland and Lithuania, between Greece and Bulgaria, came online within months. The EU Energy Platform, created to pool the bloc’s collective buying power, gave smaller member states access to market conditions they couldn’t have negotiated alone.
Consumer protection during the peak crisis years took the form of direct market intervention. Low-cost producers faced a revenue ceiling of €180 per MWh; anything above was redistributed. Fossil fuel companies recording exceptional profits contributed a temporary solidarity levy. Mandatory demand reductions, with a 5% peak-hour obligation, took some pressure off the grid. All of it expired in 2023 as the acute phase of the crisis passed.
The Market Correction Mechanism, a more sophisticated backstop approved in February 2023, was structured to trigger automatically if TTF prices stayed above €180 per MWh for three days while running €35 above global LNG benchmarks. The conditions were never met. The mechanism was allowed to lapse in January 2025.
What remains is a pricing problem that emergency rules were never designed to fix. Structurally high energy costs in the EU erode household budgets and compress industrial margins in ways that compound over time. The Affordable Energy Action Plan published in February 2025 addresses this directly, targeting €45 billion in savings this year, scaling to €130 billion annually by 2030, and €260 billion by 2040.
For over a century, energy has been something we extract. The next era begins when energy becomes something that is simply available.
