The European Council has given final approval to the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA), which aims to ‘reinforce Europe’s position’ as a leader in industrial green technologies.
The announcement marks the final step for the NZIA, which was voted through by the European Parliament in April. A provisional deal between the Council and Parliament was struck in February.
The Act will ‘create favourable conditions’ for investment in green technologies, as the Council put it. This includes simplifying the permit-granting process for strategic projects, as well as enhancing the skills of the European workforce in these sectors.
Two proposed options for the latter are high concentration industrial areas, as well as ‘net zero industry academies’. The academies, each focusing on a particular net zero technology, are reported to train 100,000 people within their first three years.
The Act has two primary benchmarks to measure its progress. The first will assess manufacturing capacity of net zero technologies, ranging from solar panels, to wind turbines, to batteries and heat pumps, reaching 40% of the EU’s deployment needs. The second is based around a specific target of 15% of world production by 2040. In addition, the NZIA will also set up an annual injection capacity of at least 50 million tonnes of CO2 to be achieved by 2030.
The provisional deal did not mention specifics of the second target, noting at the time the ‘evolution in comparison to world production.’
The NZIA was originally proposed in March 2023 as a key part of the European Commission’s Green Deal Industrial Plan. Competition from the United States and China, particularly with the US Inflation Reduction Act, was cited. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said at the time that the coming years would see ‘the shape of the… net zero economy and where it is located’ be decided.
“The Net Zero Industry Act is one of the foundation stones of a new industrial policy,” said Jo Brouns, minister of Flanders for economy, innovation, work, social economy and agriculture. “This legal act will help Europe to lead the global race for green technologies and make sure that our contribution to the fight against climate change also reduces our dependencies, reinforces our strategic autonomy and helps us to create growth and jobs in Europe.”
Some criticism of the Act has been noted. In June Bruegel, an independent body focused on improving the quality of economic policy, said the NZIA was an ‘unconvincing’ policy proposal, citing a top-down technological selection approach and a lack of financial incentives among other reasons. The revisions have not entirely convinced; Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at Bruegel and co-author of the article, told Euractiv last month that the NZIA objectives were ‘paper tigers.’
