Now, the EU wants to inject a dose of “Buy European” into its own climate efforts.
Bringing it back home
The EU executive’s strategy encompasses six pillars: lowering energy prices, creating demand, spurring investment, ensuring access to key materials, working on global partnerships and reskilling workers.
The goal: “Present European industry with a stronger business case for large climate-neutral investments in energy-intensive industries and clean tech.”
The draft places demand-stimulating measures for “Made in Europe” climate-friendly goods at the heart of the Clean Industrial Deal, reaffirming an existing goal to make 40 percent of the EU’s key clean technology components within the bloc.
To that end, the Commission wants to set quotas to ensure governments and other public authorities purchase such goods.
The Clean Industrial Deal envisions both “minimum local content requirements” and “resilience and sustainability criteria,” all set by legislation to come later this year. It also says the Commission will revise the EU’s public procurement rules in 2026 to “make European preference criteria a structural feature” for “strategic sectors.”
