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European Commission Clean Energy Technology Observatory
Strategic Energy Technology Plan Steering Group (X03975)
EU Electrification Action Plan
2026
*Clean Energy Technology Supply Chain Data (IEA) 2026
*The State of Energy Innovation 2026 (IEA)
Lowest TRLs:
- TRL 6 on “voltage regulation and fast frequency support” and “maintaining voltage, frequency and a stable power flow” referring to “Solid-state transformers” (p. 187, 189-190).
- TRL 6 on “long-duration energy storage” referring referring to “iron-air” (p. 197).
Electricity 2026 (IEA). “Japan…Efforts are also underway to accelerate the deployment of next-generation technologies such as perovskite solar cells, offshore wind power generation and advanced geothermal power generation. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has been supporting these initiatives mainly through the Green Innovation Fund, which will allocate a total of approximately JPY 2.8 trillion (Japanese yen), or around USD 18 billion, to continuously support R&D, demonstration and implementation of innovative decarbonisation technologies, including renewable energy” (pp. 139-140).
Yan, et al., 2026, Global mining outlook in 2026, in: China Mining Magazine
2025
Assembly plant or battery powerhouse? Analysis of foreign battery investments in EU, T&E, 2025. Racism on display, with Chinese and South Koreans in the frame for attack. T&E is a deeply discredited organization and its reports are of declining quality, reflective of Europe’s deep-seated white supremacy even at the supposedly progressive end of politics.
- “[I]t is still assumed that waste burning is common in low-income rural areas [in Hungary]. Also, it is very likely that respondents [to the HCSO survey] are unwilling to report the amount of waste and wood waste burned, as it is illegal to burn household waste due to its harmful effects on air quality, and violating this regulation can result in fines.”
- “[A]pproximately 1.2 million m3 of wood waste is burned annually in [Hungarian] households, equivalent to 38% of the average annual net firewood removal. This highlights the substantial role of wood waste in household energy use and its potential to fill existing gaps in biomass energy statistics.”
- “[T]o reduce the environmental and health impacts of uncontrolled household waste incineration, the development of a cascading wood waste management system is strongly advised. This would involve improving the infrastructure for the separate collection, recycling, and energy recovery of wood waste. To ensure that households – particularly in rural areas – continue to have access to affordable heating, these efforts should be accompanied by a social firewood support program and the promotion of short-rotation energy plantations. Together, these measures would support both climate and public health objectives while contributing to a more sustainable, circular bio-economy.”
Adopted SET Plan Governance – High Level (European Commission) 2025
Global Clean Power Alliance: supply chains mission vision (UK Government) 2025
*Renewable Energy Roadmap: Eastern Partnership (International Renewable Energy Agency) 2025. “Establish joint research and development initiatives with EU partners on solar and wind innovation” (p. 61)
*Regional energy transition outlook: European Union (International Renewable Energy Agency) 2025. “Long-term priorities (2041-2050)…This will require far-sighted investment in research and development to support enabling technologies like long-duration energy storage and grid forming inverters” (p. 117)
*European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics (ETIP), Conference 2025 – Summary. “PV’s target: a factor of European competitiveness? Understanding the competitiveness dynamics within the PV value chain – Peter Fath (RCT Solutions). In his keynote, Peter Fath (RCT Solutions) explored Europe’s position in the global solar PV manufacturing landscape. He highlighted Europe’s near-total dependency on China for key components like silicon wafers, stressing the urgent need to rebuild an integrated solar PV value chain, from silicon metal to inverters, within Europe. Despite this, Fath noted Europe’s strengths: world-class innovators, established research institutes, and a highly educated workforce. These assets, he argued, are critical for restoring manufacturing competitiveness. Cost comparisons revealed that while production in Europe remains more expensive than in China, regional advantages, such as low labour costs in Eastern Europe and affordable green energy in the North, could make European solar panels viable if leveraged effectively. He called for gigafactory-scale investment to industrialise innovative European solar PV technologies, particularly TOPCon (Tunnel oxide passivated contact) and HJT (Heterojunction) cells, and encouraged policymakers to use Net Zero Industry Act tools, like streamlined permits, public procurement incentives and R&D support, to close the competitiveness gap.”
*Meckling, 2025, The geoeconomic turn in decarbonization, in: Nature
*Kezia Sasitharan and Marina Freitag, 2025, From zombies to smart devices: the evolution of dye-sensitized solar cells for IoT applications, in: ACS Applied Energy Materials. See also: Muñoz-García, et al., 2021, Dye-sensitized solar cells strike back, in: Chemical Society Reviews.
2024
*Tavera, 2024, A Short-Lived Energy Self-Sufficiency Dream: Nixon’s Project Independence. A study of the practical results of Project Independence between 1973 and 1976 (Università Ca’ Foscari)
*European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics (ETIP) PV Industry Working Group, 2024, PV Manufacturing in Europe: Ensuring resilience through industrial policy. “Topics of specific importance for machinery and equipment R&I, to name a few, include data-driven machine learning approaches, carbon footprint of the equipment, lower consumables use, high-quality results proven on product level…The PV technology cycle is quite short: The ITRPV report highlights the rapid rate at which new technologies emerge and become mainstream in the market. Within 5 years, a new PV technology can have moved from being considered highly innovative and reserved for high-cost applications to having become the market baseline. In Europe, this is the order of magnitude of the time needed to construct a new production facility for PV in the GW scale, which means that new investments are at risk of not being able to compete on performance soon after starting operations. While it is a challenge for PV companies, which need to rapidly scale-up and improve their scale and competitiveness in PV manufacturing, a proper coupling of research and innovation and industrial policies is something that policy makers can achieve at the European and national level. A crucial challenge of the current industrial policy is to ensure the European PV sector will be able to ride the upcoming wave of innovative technologies, most notably with the emergence of new processes for emerging materials such as perovskites.”
Regulation (EU) 2024/1735 (“Net Zero Industry Act”). “a benchmark of at least 40 % of the Union’s annual deployment needs for the corresponding technologies necessary to achieve the Union’s 2030 climate and energy targets; (b) an increased Union share for the corresponding technologies with a view to reaching 15 % of world production by 2040…adding manufacturing capacity in the Union for a net-zero technology, for which the Union depends for more than 50 % on imports coming from third countries”. The main interventions under “Innovation” are “regulatory sandboxes” and the “Strategic Energy Technology Plan Steering Group”.
2023
*Laura María Pérez Caballero, et al., 2023, Developing the next generation of renewable energy technologies: an overview of low-TRL EU-funded research projects (Open Research Europe). PERCISTAND, GreEnergy, X-ROTOR.
Kleimann, et al., 2023, Green tech race? The US Inflation Reduction Act and the EU Net Zero Industry Act, in: The World Economy. “The NZIA as proposed by the European Commission is a partial and poorly designed response to the IRA (US Inflation Reduction Act).”
Pichler, et al., 2023, Building an alliance to map global supply networks, in: Science
*Aurélien Saussay and Natalia Zugravu-Soilita, 2023, International production chains and the pollution offshoring hypothesis: An empirical investigation, in: Resource and Energy Economics. “Using a measure of sectoral linkage between acquiring and target firms, our study supports pollution offshoring hypothesis.”
2022
*Aufant, 2022, Oil for Atoms: The 1970s Energy Crisis and Nuclear Proliferation in the Persian Gulf, in: Texas National Security Review
*Jayita Sarkar, 2022, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War. “It might be tempting to think that today, India’s nuclear program is no longer a collection of ploughshares and swords, but is merely more swords. That would be a mistake. The deliberate ambiguity in the nuclear program is both the source of its leaders’ freedom of action as well as the key to the anti-dissent machine that the program is. Ploughshares and swords, thus, sustain an antidemocratic culture in the largest democracy in the world in the name of freedom.” (p. 204)
Clean Cloud 2022 Tracking Renewable Energy Use in China’s Tech Industry (Greenpeace)
2021
Muth, et al., 2021, Globally and locally applicable technologies to accelerate electrification, in: Electrification: Accelerating the Energy Transition
Hamblin, 2021, The Wretched Atom: America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology
2010-2020
Edwards, 2020, The State of the North Sea: Thatcherism and the Fossil Economy (Lunds Universitet)
Xin-Gang and You, 2018, Technological progress and industrial performance: a case study of solar photovoltaic industry, in: Renewable Sustainable Energy Reviews
Lethé et al., 2014, The European Commission 1958-72: history and memories of an institution. “The energy crisis years…highlighted the vulnerability that stemmed from the lack of a Community energy market. On a political level, such heterogeneity hindered the solidarity measures needed in the event of an oil supply crisis. On an economic level, it artificially-amplified the effects of scarcity on prices. Over the years the Commission had therefore been able to demonstrate the need for profound change and lay the groundwork for the creation of a large energy market from the late 1980s onwards” p. 383.
Kander, et al., 2014, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries
Kemp, 2013, The Official History of North Sea Oil and Gas, vol. 1
Kolb, 2013, The Natural Gas Revolution: At the Pivot of the World’s Energy Future
Yu Zhongdong, 2012, LED Industry Development Trends and China’s Development Strategy, in: Chinese and Foreign Entrepreneurs [余中东 LED产业发展态势及中国的发展战略]
Wilson, 2012, A history of the UK renewable energy programme, 1974-88: some social, political, and economic aspects, PhD thesis. Notes the Wave Energy Programme (1975-1982). This was a scheme, promoted by the Chief Scientist of the (then) Department of Energy, Dr Walter Marshall, to create device that would generate electricity from waves around the coast of the UK. Various devices were developed and tested e.g., Salter’s Duck, Cockerell’s Raft, Masuda’s buoy, Russell’s Rectifier, the Flexible Bag, the triplate, the cylinder, and ‘the Clam’.
Li, 2011, Evolution of national LED industry and evaluation of regional competition [李胜会 我国LED产业演进轨迹及其区域竞争评估]. “Especially after 2003, the Ministry of Science and Technology launched the Semiconductor Lighting Project, supporting technological innovation and industrialization of semiconductor lighting in the fields of key technology research and development and the ‘863 Program’ in new materials….From 2004 to 2007, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved the establishment of seven national-level semiconductor lighting industrial bases in Shanghai, Dalian, Nanchang, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Yangzhou, and Shijiazhuang. From 2009 to 2010, six more national-level high-tech industrialization bases for semiconductor lighting engineering were approved in Tianjin, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Ningbo, Dongguan, and Xi’an.” The author was Li Shenghui.
Tian, 2011, Development of the national LED lighting industry, Shanxi University of Finance and Economics [田伟达 我国LED照明产业发展问题研究学]
Alekperov, 2011, Oil of Russia: Past, Present, Future
Topçu, 2010, L’agir contestataire à l’épreuve de l’atome: critique et gouvernement de la critique dans l’histoire de l’énergie nucléaire en France (1968-2008). “The Plan Messmer differs from the nuclear power plant projects of the 1950s & 1960s. In contrast to these, [which were] largely driven by technical & military ambitions (French nuclear technology + French bomb), the Plan Messmer is a program focused on questions of profitability and international competition. This resulted in the choice of the American light water reactor, considered more profitable (even if there was no lack of uncertainties on the subject at the time) & technically more suited to large-scale production, compared to the French UNGG” p. 61.
Arond and Bell, 2010, Trends in the Global Distribution of R&D since the 1970s: data, their interpretation and limitations. “[T]here has been a continuing increase in global expenditure on research and development activities since the 1970s – more than a tenfold increase from about US $100 billion in 1973 to nearly 1,138 billion in 2007…But this has not quite kept up with the general growth of the world economy as measured in GDP. This is reflected in the estimates for global R&D intensity: falling from 2.1% in 1973 to a more or less stable level of about 1.7% between 1990 and 2007” p. 16.
*Dooley, 2010, The Rise and Decline of US Private Sector Investments in Energy R&D since the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 (DOE). “[I]n the immediate aftermath of the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, there was a large surge in US private sector investments in energy R&D that peaked in the period between 1980 and 1982 at approximately $3.7 billion to $6.7 billion per year (in inflation adjusted 2010 U.S. dollars)…Private sector investments in energy R&D declined from this peak to a nadir of approximately $1-$1.8 billion per year in 1999. US private sector support for energy R&D has recovered somewhat over the past decade and now stands at $2.2-$3.4 billion…[T]he US private sector’s support for energy R&D has been and remains dominated by fossil energy R&D, particularly R&D related to the needs of the oil and gas industry…[P]rivate sector investments in energy R&D were strongly correlated to real price of crude oil throughout the 1970s and 1980s. That correlation has weakened substantially since the 1990s, suggesting that R&D aimed at developing non-fossil energy alternatives may have become a more prominent and durable private sector energy R&D priority.” (p. 12)
2000-2010
Parker, 2009 and 2013, The Official History of UK Privatization
Howarth and Jonker, 2007, A History of Royal Dutch Shell, vol. 2. “The ‘drins [a type of insecticide] represented the Group’s [Shell’s] ideal chemical product. They were well protected by patents, hydrocarbon-based, and research-intensive; they were modern and glamorous in offering an instant, technical solution to ancient scourges of mankind; they fitted in well with other manufacturing processes; and they combined low volume with stupendously high margins….in 1965, a fairly typical year, pesticides generated 14% of the sales and 23% of the profits from the chemical function.”
Alison Kraft, 2006, Between medicine and industry: medical physics and the rise of the radioisotope 1945-65, in: Contemporary British History
Kazmerski, 2006, Solar photovoltaics R&D at the tipping point: a 2005 technology overview, in: Journal of Electron Spectroscopy and Related Phenomena
Smith, 2004, Britain’s revival and fall in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, 1950-71
Helm, 2003, Energy, the State, and the Market: British Energy Policy since 1979
*Gillian Staerck (ed.), 2002, The Development of North Sea Oil and Gas (Institute of Historical Research). Christopher Harvie: “I might be described as a premature historian of North Sea oil
because I was commissioned in 1991 by Hamish Hamilton and Channel 4 to do a book called Fool’s Gold, published in Autumn 1994, accompanying Denys Blakeway’s three-part TV series Wasted Windfall. I do not claim it to be more than an interim, and necessarily somewhat journalistic, account but it was an attempt to fill a huge hole in our political history. During the course of writing, I read three biographies of Harold Wilson: the authorised one by Philip Ziegler, another by Austin Morgan, and yet a third by Ben Pimlott. In none of these was there mention of North Sea oil, despite Wilson’s centrality to the business. This is something that implies a more general question. Why has such an enormous enterprise, on the same scale as the building of the railways in the nineteenth century, simply leaked out of British history? I reviewed quite recently in The Independent a book by Professor Norman Davies called The Isles, a history of the British archipelago, in which oil gets a couple of sentences, and that’s it…People in the oil industry and in government have much of which they ought to be deeply proud: the dramatic technological advances achieved in, for example, positioning in the North Sea, or the work that was done in sub-surface exploration. The implications of computerisation and satellites working together revolutionised, at the edge of an extremely difficult field, the whole way in which future industry would be organised. If vast investment brought relatively few jobs, this was because the North Sea was the predecessor of the ‘workerless factory’ that we now can see taking shape in Germany…People subsequently realised that the International Monetary Fund [IMF] intervention had been to a great extent caused by the North Sea project, which required great imports of machinery and material to extract the oil, and triggered the balance-of-payments crisis.” (pp. 37-39)
*Watanabe, et al., 2000, Industrial dynamism and the creation of a “virtuous cycle” between R&D, market growth and price reduction: the case of photovoltaic power generation (PV) development in Japan, in: Technovation
Before 2000
*Harvie, 1994, Fool’s Gold: the Story of North Sea Oil
Brand, 1994, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built
Gustafson, 1989, Crisis Amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev
*Painter, 1986, Oil and the American Century
*Schneider, 1983, The Oil Price Revolution
*Bertrand Goldschmidt, 1982, The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy. “
Cooper, 1975, Resource needs revisited (Brookings Institution)
Federal Energy Administration, 1974, Project Independence Blueprint: Transcript of First Public Hearing. “Project Independence is a wide-ranging program this growing dependence on foreign sources of energy, and to develop positive programs to reduce our vulnerability to future oil cut-offs and price increases…The Federal Energy Administration will hold public hearings on Project Independence Blueprint, covering major aspects of the program and focusing on both local and national energy concerns. The opportunity to…be involved in the decision-making process will be available to everyone – representatives of the energy industries, environmental groups, consumers, and public officials” (p. iv).
The Mattei Affair, 1970, Francesco Rosi [film]
Karel Vereycken, undated, Aérotrain, high speed rail and nuclear technology: the lessons of Jean Bertin. “Even before starting the Promethean project of the Aérotrain, five obstacles arose in front of Bertin [a French engineer]: the British, the press, the banks, conservatism and the inherent inertia of a public authority that has drifted away from its original mission to become an instrument to protect the privileges of an oligarchy…From the gems of optimism emitted by…the Aérotrain, we fell into the pessimism of the Club of Rome and the narcissist vomiting of Jean-Paul Sartre” p. 13.
| “The Oil Crisis” [1973, 1979] Miller, 2024, Britain and Japan in the 1973 Middle East Oil Crisis: Washington’s Silent Partners Doğan, 2024, Colonial and Postcolonial Oil Politics in the Persian Gulf Wellum, 2023, Energizing Neoliberalism: the 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America Kreienbaum, 2023, Between panic and feelings of empowerment: emotional reactions to the first oil crisis and the debate about a new international economic order, in: New Global Studies Vázquez-Fariñas, 2023, Major economic recessions in the last quarter of the 20th century: the oil crisis (1973–1980), in: The Age of Global Economic Crises (1929-2022) Kuiken, 2023, Oil for Britain: the United Kingdom and the Remaking of the International Oil Industry, 1957-1988 Auffant, 2022, Globalizing Oil, Unleashing Capital: an International History of the 1970s Energy Crisis (Harvard University) Cohen, 2021, The First Oil Shock? Nixon, Congress, and the 1973 Petroleum Crisis, in: Journal of the Middle East and Africa Sparenberg, 2020, The commodity crisis of the 1970s: scarcity, vulnerability and the West German metal supply, in: European Review of History Jacobs, 2017, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s *Bini, et al. (eds.), 2016, Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and its Economic Legacy *Historical Social Research, 2014, Special issue: the energy crises of the 1970s: anticipations and reactions in the industrialized world. Bösch and Rüdige: “looking back at the 1970s, there is a tendency to share the stance of contemporary observers and reiterate past conflicts in present guises, sometimes using newly available sources…the articles in this volume challenge the importance of the first oil crisis as a global turning point…Since it has been common sense for both contemporaries and historians to describe oil as a globally traded good, the volume questions how “global” the transnational flow of oil and, thus, the oil crises truly were.” *Painter, 2014, Oil and geopolitics: the oil crises of the 1970s and the Cold War, in: Historical Social Research *Painter, 2013, Oil and Geopolitics: the Oil Crises of the 1970s and Beyond (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Graf, 2012, Making Use of the “Oil Weapon”: Western Industrialized Countries and Arab Petropolitics in 1973-1974, in: Diplomatic History Killen, 2007, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America *Venn, 2002, The Oil Crisis *Yergin, 1991, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power *Schneider, 1983, The Oil Price Revolution [chapters 8 and 13] *Vernon (ed.), 1976, The Oil Crisis |
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