The European Union has stepped on the accelerator to respond to the subsidies that the United States approved this summer to boost the energy transition.
The Commission's proposal is not yet finalized, but the Community Executive already has several clear ideas.
One of them is to give aid for "green investments in strategic sectors", including "tax credits", as can be read in a document prepared by the vice president, Margrethe Vestager, responsible for Competition and State Aid, sent to the ministers of Economy of the twenty-seven
The text, to which EL PAÍS has had access, consists of a letter dated this Friday, January 13, and an annex that accompanies it.
In it, the possibility of "creating a new common European fund to support countries in a fair and balanced way" is also mentioned.
Vestager gives Member States up to leeway until January 25 to respond to his letter with his vision on the reform of state aid that the Commission is preparing.
The initiative has been launched at the request of the governments themselves, especially Germany and France.
Since the US Congress gave the green light to Joe Biden's flagship project in August, which contemplates more than 369,000 million dollars in aid, alarm on this side of the Atlantic has been growing.
At the last European Council, held on December 15, EU leaders commissioned the Commission to formulate its proposals by January.
They fear that products
made in the USA
will obtain advantages in the market due to subsidies, but, above all, there is panic that companies decide to move investments in key sectors for the energy and environmental transition (renewables, electric cars, batteries) to the United States .
It is not difficult to hear some German MEP echo the possibility that Tesla decides not to build its planned battery factory for electric vehicles in Berlin to finally do so in the United States.
In Kiruna, in the Swedish region of Lapland where the meeting of the college of commissioners has been held for two days, the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has once again charged against the Washington law that she considers discriminatory for European companies and which in his opinion constitutes unfair competition.
Together with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson (who will hold the rotating EU presidency this semester), Von der Leyen has promised a "strong and reassuring" and "quick" response to the US law. "We want to support and maintain the industry because we need it for the green transition and our prosperity”, he said.
“What is important to us is that the cleantech sector, with all its innovative power, has a level playing field.
We want to compete on quality, not on subsidies” she added.
Sweden, which will have to take the helm of the reforms and agreements within the EU during this semester, until it hands over the baton to Spain —it will preside over the Union in the second part of the year—, is one of the countries that has warned against a state aid run.
“We need to start a real discussion on how to improve productivity, competitiveness and how to attract more companies with formulas based on our own capabilities and which are based on long-term state aid rules”, the Swedish Prime Minister remarked.
Boost from Germany and France
This debate gained a lot of strength in December.
Then the German, Robert Habeck, and French, Bruno Le Maire, finance ministers sent a document to Brussels demanding changes such as those proposed by Vestager.
He spreads the idea that the current regulation puts up too many obstacles and absorbs a lot of time in procedures for a situation like the current one, in which there is global competition to not miss the bandwagon of energy and ecological change.
The Commission has endorsed it: “We need to speed up the green transition.
We have to work hard to remove existing barriers in the single market," the Danish vice-president states in the letter.
These "barriers" are the obstacles placed on public aid to the private sector so that partners with more fiscal capacity (Germany,
The Spanish Government shares the analysis and has already transferred it to the Commission in a document sent last Monday and advanced by EL PAÍS, even before Vestager's letter.
It demands that the relaxation of requirements be linked to the investments planned in the Recovery Fund and that it be subject to the duration of the latter.
According to what can be read in the letter from Brussels, this last part will be addressed, since it indicates that the support to prevent investment flight "should be limited in time."
It also seems that it complies with the requests of Spain —which reflected the concern of a multitude of countries— when it outlines how to allow subsidies to avoid investment flight,
since it talks about including tax credits and “going beyond what is possible under the regional aid guidelines”.
One of the problems that Madrid has encountered when giving subsidies in the PERTE of the electric car, precisely, has been the community resistance to granting subsidies to large companies that are in already developed areas (such as the large battery factory in Sagunto).
And according to the document, Vestager seems to point in that direction.
Both the letter and the annex signed by the head of Competition make it very clear that the Commission intends to square the circle: to be more permissive with subsidies without breaking the single market.
The first is clear when he states that his intentions are to "facilitate the calculation of aid and faster approval", "extend the scope of all renewable technologies" or "provide the provision of support for new investments for production facilities, including tax exemptions.
The second is the creation of a new fund that supports all countries in a "fair and equitable manner."
French proposal
This idea also appears in the French
Made in Europe plan,
which the Emmanuel Macron Administration has sent to Brussels.
The ten-page document to which this newspaper has had access includes the same words that the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, uses when talking about this investment tool: "sovereignty fund", a semantic twist. , to the concept of “strategic autonomy”, so fashionable in the EU in recent times.
The French document clarifies, contrary to what the Brussels text does, that the money must come from resources already budgeted in the European recovery fund, the RepowerEU plan or the money allocated to "climate neutrality".
Paris even proposes, "the review by the Member States of their national recovery plans could reallocate all or part of the 365,000 million euros assigned and not yet disbursed, primarily to strategic sectors for European industry."
“Some 221 billion euros of loans remain to be assigned.
Also in this case, Member States should give priority to strategic European industrial sectors”, he adds.
Other elements of the French plan to compete with the
made in the USA
include pointing out strategic sectors to which to allocate aid —an idea that already appears in another document that France sent together with Germany to Brussels in December— or that important projects of European interest (PIIEC) are processed in four months.
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