France moved closer to securing a carve-out from the European Union’s plans to massively scale up renewable energy this decade in order to better account for its nuclear sector.
The bloc’s 27 member states will discuss on Wednesday re-opening a landmark deal reached with parliament to scale-up renewables to at least 42.5% of the energy mix, according to people familiar with the matter.
France has been pushing to amend the text of the agreement over concerns about the cost and time needed to upgrade its gas-powered ammonia plants so that they use hydrogen produced using renewable electricity. It has consistently argued that nuclear, which doesn’t produce emissions, should be treated similarly to renewables like wind and solar.
Sweden, which holds the rotating Presidency of the bloc, will present to countries on Wednesday a change to the preliminary part of the legal text so that France can get an exemption for those facilities, so long as they move away from fossil fuel-based hydrogen, according to a document seen by Bloomberg.
Any re-opening of the deal would be a big win for France, as such a move is highly unusual in the EU legislative process. Parliament and member states had agreed a position in March this year, before Paris made a last-minute interjection to win stronger backing.
Sweden wants to secure the support of member state officials before a meeting of energy ministers next week, where any debate on renewables could overshadow the push to agree a common position on an overhaul of the EU’s electricity market.
Germany and Spain have previously led calls to prevent a re-opening of the deal, and it’s not yet clear if parliament negotiators would agree to such a move. Germany made a similar 11th-hour intervention earlier this year to secure assurances that combustion engines running on so-called e-fuels would be allowed after a cutoff in 2035. That move didn’t involve going back into the text of the deal.
While EU ambassadors will have the first chance to back the text on Wednesday, they may need more time to examine it, the people said. Another meeting of member states is scheduled on Friday.
(Updates with Germany’s deal on e-fuels in penultimate paragraph.)
