The EU27’s ‘energy-renewables’ ecosystem: international competitiveness, dependencies and policy aspects

The energy-renewables ecosystem (ERES) plays a particularly important role in the green transition. This paper analyses the EU27 international competitiveness and dependencies vis-à-vis other global players and identifies structural dependencies and vulnerabilities at the industry and product levels. Several key findings emerge from the analysis. First, at the global level, the EU27 is the second most-important exporter after China, although it lost competitiveness over the past years. In 2022, the EU ecosystem depended on imports of coal and lignite and a variety of manufacturing products from China (including medium- and high-tech electronic products). While similar degrees of dependencies are also found for the US and Japan, our findings point to a degree of vulnerability in the ERES supply chain that needs to be addressed by further policy initiatives as discussed in this paper.