Global Annual Energy Meeting

Securing the EU’s Industrial Lead for a Future Net-Zero Economy

Tuesday, May 23, 2023, 9:00 – 13:15 CEST  |  Esade Business and Law School, Madrid (C. Mateo Inurria, 25, 27, 28036 Madrid)

Energy prices have risen significantly since the second half of 2021, aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This has created a stronger incentive to accelerate the implementation of the European Green Deal by hastening the transition towards clean energy technologies. To that end, the EU released last year the REPowerEU initiative to address the immediate disruptions to the energy market, followed by the Green Deal Industrial Plan and a Net Zero Industry Act this year, as a response to the increasing industrial and geopolitical shifts taking place across the globe in the race towards net-zero economies.

At the moment, the EU is heavily dependent, or at risk of becoming so, on concentrated imports for certain net zero technologies and their components. This is accompanied by an increasing number of trading partners enacting policies which can drag investments in relevant supply chains away from the EU. The challenge now lies in creating a favourable environment in which the bloc not only promotes an increase in the manufacturing and export capacity of clean energy technologies, but also ensures the competitiveness of its industrial base.

In order to examine all of these dimensions, Esade’s Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics (EsadeGeo) is hosting – together with the Representation of the European Commission in Spain and EIT InnoEnergy – the eleventh edition of its Global Annual Energy Meeting. This meeting provides a forum where business leaders and policymakers can discuss how energy technologies, geopolitics, and regulation will affect business and society in the medium term.