Industry decarbonisation, including through electrification, is becoming a core priority of EU policies. Following the Draghi report on EU competitiveness and the Antwerp declaration, the European Commission’s president issued in summer 2024 her political guidelines, announcing a Clean Industrial Deal (CID), which would have included, inter alia, an Industrial Decarbonization Accelerator Act (IDAA) to “support industries in the transition”. The CID[1] was then published in February 2025, confirming a strong focus on the decarbonization of energy-intensive industries such as steel, metals and chemicals.

Electrification is one of the main decarbonization pathways for energy-intensive industries. It is estimated that up to half of the fossil consumption of the EU industry could be electrified with current technologies (McKinsey, 2020). In particular, the latter are already broadly available for low-to-medium temperature heat processes (Compass Lexecon, 2024). However, the electrification rate of the EU industry has been stagnating over the past decades, at around 33%, as shown in the first instalment of this Topic of the Month. Numerous barriers to electrification, explaining such a slow pace, were identified by the industry (see, for example, Eurelectric, 2025). This includes inadequate taxation levels (i.e., tax rates higher for electricity than for fossil fuels), high investment costs, increased and uncertain energy procurement costs, and pressure from international competition.

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https://fsr.eui.eu/unlocking-industry-electrification-an-overview-of-eu-policies-and-regulatory-framework/