Brussels, 16 Septembre 2026
As of this Monday, European power prices reached three year highs, Brent crude oil crossed $100 a barrel, and EU gas storage is running short of its winter target with weeks to go before the injection season closes. Today’s State of the European Union (SOTEU) address read the moment correctly. It just stopped one step short of acting on it.
The diagnosis in the speech was largely right:
- Fossil dependence is a strategic vulnerability, not just a market inconvenience
- Europeans feel the cost of our general dependence on fossil fuels. “Since the start of the conflict, imported fossil fuels have cost us an additional €90 billion, without a single molecule of energy added”,
- We need to electrify Europe: clean electrification would avoid €260bn a year in fossil fuel imports by 2040. She rightly added “We must invest faster. Speed up grid connections. Develop storage. In short, let’s make Europe’s future electric.”
However, the main missing point of Ursula von der Leyen’s address is the one thing that would have turned the otherwise good diagnosis into delivery: an independent, Commission-mandated report on Europe’s energy security, in the model of the Draghi and Letta reports.
Europe does not lack energy policy. It lacks an honest, country-by-country, science-based account of how policy is landing on the ground and what the concrete impact of our fossil fuel dependence is on the EU. A report of this kind would let Europe take stock of the multiple regulations, directives, plans and communications produced over the last several years, assess them against real Member State implementation, quantify the financial toll, and the impact of our dependence on imported fossil fuels on industries, households and the climate, and draw concrete recommendations that would ensure this energy crisis is the last fossil fuel crisis our continent faces.
“Today’s speech named the right problem and even sketched the right solutions. What’s missing is the instrument that makes those solutions stick: an independent assessment with political weight to hold Member States into account. We’ve made this case for months, and we’ll keep making it. A barrel at $100 doesn’t leave room for uncertainty,” said Adrian Hiel, Director of the Electrification Alliance.
The Electrification Alliance will continue to push for this report to be commissioned, and stands ready to contribute evidence, member expertise and country-level data the moment the Commission decides to act on it.