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Fatih Birol, director de la AIE: "Electrificar todo es fundamental para el futuro de Europa"
Fatih Birol, director de la Agencia Internacional de la Energía (AIE), dijo a ‘Euronews’ en Davos que la seguridad energética de Europa y sus objetivos climáticos dependen de electrificar todo: la infraestructura, el transporte y los edificios.
MÁS INFORMACIÓN : http://es.euronews.com/2026/01/23/electrificarlo-todo-clave-para-el-futuro-de-europa-dice-el-director-de-la-aie-a-euronews-e
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Fatih Birol, director de la Agencia Internacional de la Energía (AIE), dijo a ‘Euronews’ en Davos que la seguridad energética de Europa y sus objetivos climáticos dependen de electrificar todo: la infraestructura, el transporte y los edificios.
MÁS INFORMACIÓN : http://es.euronews.com/2026/01/23/electrificarlo-todo-clave-para-el-futuro-de-europa-dice-el-director-de-la-aie-a-euronews-e
¡Suscríbete a nuestro canal! Euronews está disponible en 12 idiomas
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00:00I would like to open the floor with a bit of a wider, more vague question.
00:13And Mr. Bureau, I would like to start with you, please, on it.
00:17Europe is quite often criticized for being too slow, for taking too much time for certain decisions.
00:24I would like to ask you, how do you see Europe's clean energy transition when it compares with global competitors?
00:33So I will not give a broad answer to your question about the Europe is being criticized as being too slow, because I don't agree.
00:44You don't agree that you're obviously...
00:46No, I don't agree.
00:46Today, Europe, today, Europe's, the share of clean energy in Europe is 70%, and the global average is 40%.
00:55So if you were too slow in Europe, it wouldn't be there.
00:57This is one part, but in general, there is a bit of a Europe bashing around, and I think one has to look at different parameters about Europe.
01:06Of course, as every country, every region in Europe has its own challenges, deficiencies, difficulties, but sometimes it's going too far, I should say, especially when it comes to clean energy.
01:18Europe has 70% of it is Europe's electricity comes from clean power, and the global average is 40%.
01:25The problem in Europe is, in my view, is not only the share of clean energy, but the price of electricity.
01:36The price of electricity in Europe is very high compared to, I don't know, the competitors such as the U.S., such as China, three, four times higher than those regions, those countries.
01:50And as such, a major challenge for the competitiveness of Europe industry.
01:56And now, what do we have to do in Europe?
01:58I think we have to see that when we look at the security of energy in Europe, Europe's other goals, such as reaching our climate goals, but also at the same time being affordable,
02:16I see one future for Europe, electrify everything, as much as you can electrify everything, transportation industry and so on.
02:25And for this, Europe needs the electricity master plan, how we are going to electrify it.
02:31And in order to do that, we have to do two things, in my view.
02:35One, grits, grits, grits, grits, there's a big bottleneck there, we can talk a bit later.
02:42And the second, the pricing of electricity.
02:46How we are going to price electricity so that we can make it affordable for the consumers, for households, industry.
02:54So, the way forward is electrifying the European economy as much as we can, and at the same time enable to that, we need grits, building of grits,
03:07and at the same time making the prices affordable through different tax policies and through different pricing regimes.
03:14Minister, what's your take on this, also from national perspective?
03:18How do you see, has Europe dropped that ball, or Europe nowadays is being bashed, as Mr. Birol said, too much?
03:26If we are speaking about speed, once you need to use 10, 11 years for a bureaucratic approval for a hydropower plant or a nuclear power plant,
03:36once you could build it in three and four years, definitely we have an issue inside of you.
03:41So, in that perspective, I'm pretty sure that I'm ready to make that reshuffle and to start with my country, with Romania,
03:47to discuss very clearly about debureaucratization and to cut off all that stuff that are blocking us to make more energy.
03:56In this moment, doubling the resource of energy now in Europe and in Romania is the only way to bring out and to bring down the prices of the energy.
04:07We are paying, in my country, related with the income of the people, the highest price of energy in the entire European Union.
04:15We are in the same bubble with Hungaria, with Bulgaria, and with Greece.
04:21And we are starting all together to work and to have a strong voice at the Brussels level with Dan Jorgensen, the European Commissioner,
04:28and to start to make strong investment in greed, as Mr. President Fatih Birol said before, because we need to diversify our resources, not only in renewables.
04:37I want, and we have the good alliance of friends of nuclear, I want to use EU resources to finance nuclear.
04:44We have a huge history of nuclear, 25, 20 to 25 percent of my country production are getting from the nuclear to get to hydropower plants.
04:54That's one of the best ways to bring cheap and baseline energy.
05:01And in that perspective, I just want to look at Romania as a country which starts to make that shift, based on data, not on ideology.
05:10And making Romania, a country which is not dependent by the imports, a country which has as much energy to use and to bring to our neighbors,
05:21will have a strong Romania, a strong Bulgaria, a strong Greece, a strong Hungary, and so on, will bring a strong European Union.
05:29Otherwise, if you are stuck in some ideas that everyone should put only wind or only solar panels, definitely will have an issue.
05:37That's one of the, that's one of the major aspects when it, when we talk about the strategic autonomy that the European Union is envisioning when it comes to the energy sector.
05:47It's not, in my perspective, when I speak about energy, it's not about molecules or physics.
05:52It's about freedom of people.
05:56It's about democracy.
05:58And for example, we have that Russian blackmail, Moldova, Ukraine, starting with 2020, 2021, the entire Europe.
06:06And in this moment, daily, I receive requests from Moldova and for Ukraine to help them and to support them to don't bring in a blackout in Ukraine.
06:16So we are making that, and we are making that, and we are a security provider for the region.
06:20But to have that role more, we should bring out all that bureaucratic procedures to keep it what we should keep, but we need speed.
06:30Ms. Burke, what's, what's your take on this, especially when Fatibiro and Minister just mentioned the speed that is needed and is not there, there.
06:40You have a different perspective of that, right?
06:43What's, what's your take?
06:44I think that although the topic for this conversation is if Europe can compete with clean power, I think that the question is rather the opposite.
06:56If we can compete in an economy that is based on fossil fuels, exactly due to what Fatib said, that, you know, fossil fuels are much more expensive in Europe than they are in the U.S. and China,
07:09because there is simply much more domestic production in U.S. and China.
07:13So we are still importing 90% of the fossil fuels we are consuming in Europe, and we're doing that at a value of 400 billion euros every year.
07:24So I think that, you know, it's very difficult to be competitive on those premises.
07:29And at the same time, I'm very hopeful, because I think we are moving in a quite high pace, and Fatib gave some good examples of how fast this transition is happening,
07:38and that is only over the last 20 years.
07:41And we are actually living in the middle of that transition.
07:45And we have been reshaping our business, but also the markets that we are active in.
07:51And although that reshaping in Europe has been, so far, a lot around offshore wind, onshore wind, a bit of solar as well, etc.,
08:01I think that we really need to leverage the strengths we have in order to do this much faster.
08:08And that's also when the benefits come, because we have seen the sort of rapid scaling of some of these technologies.
08:15And if you take offshore wind, for example, just in the last 10 years, we have seen the cost go down with 25%,
08:20and the output has been three-folded compared to what it was before.
08:25Now we need to add also other technologies, like nuclear.
08:30So even though we are one of the sort of largest providers of offshore wind in Europe, and building quite a lot of it,
08:38we are also building new nuclear.
08:39We are operating existing nuclear plants today, but we are also now into a project where we will build new nuclear
08:47in the shape and form of small modular reactors, which are not so small, by the way.
08:52They are either 300 megawatts each or 470 megawatt each, looking at the suppliers that we still have.
08:59And it's only by volume and scale that we can get the same kind of cost curve in that development.
09:04So we will need all the fossil-free technologies that we can get our hands on.
09:09But it is important to understand that European economy can, in the long run, only be competitive if we phase out the fossil fuels.
09:17And I think that we actually have really good prerequisites to do that from more than an energy perspective,
09:24because this energy is going to be used by industrial players and by households in the end.
09:30And I think we have some leading industrial players in cleantech in Europe that we can scale in order to make the demand there,
09:39because we will never be able to afford to subsidize all of this power into the market.
09:44We need to have sound businesses that can use and want to use this energy in order to build their value chains.
09:51And that can be in steel, in cement, in car manufacturing, in heavy transportation, or in other industrial areas,
10:00where we actually have a lot of lighthouse projects already today.
10:04And I think to do that and scale fast enough, then, back to your origin of the question and the scaling,
10:11I think that we need to steer away from this brown bubble and make sure that we can lead rather than lag.
10:21And three things are needed to do that.
10:23We need stable and credible policy frameworks, because that will reduce the risks for all of us investing in this business.
10:33And it will unlock capital that they're willing to go in here.
10:37And I know that, because we speak to the capital market basically every week.
10:41And we know what it takes in order for them to invest in our projects.
10:46Secondly, we need to remember that we are not just building assets.
10:50We are building systems.
10:52So we need to make sure we don't put all our efforts into one part of the system, only to the clean industries,
10:59or only into electricity generation, or only into grids.
11:02But I agree that grids goes first right now.
11:05So we need to make sure we have a system perspective.
11:08And lastly, we need to safeguard efficient markets, because only that will provide sound business models, cross-value chains in the end.
11:18And that's how you build prosperous, competitive businesses going forward.
11:22So I think we have all the prerequisites to do that, but we need to do it.
11:26Mr. Zemla, on this opening point, I want to hear your view regarding the importance of making it faster when it comes to Europe's competitiveness,
11:36and whether Europe is lagging too much, whether it dropped too much the ball, or is there still room to pick it up?
11:43What he mentioned about the prices, about affordable prices, but supply security and also the green energy so-called has also cost.
11:52I think high prices are manageable.
11:55We can manage the high prices as long as they are predictable.
11:59Because what we don't like, the volatility of the prices.
12:03When I say we, we as the power generators, and we as the industry.
12:09Because both sides have to give their decisions with predictable numbers.
12:13Which means, I think there is enough capacity in Turkey as well as in Europe for more capacity.
12:19But what we need is an energy system with much more digitalized, much more smart solutions,
12:27such as storages, smart grids, demand side managements.
12:31This is what we need.
12:31We have to manage the system, not only by investing additional capacity.
12:36Yes, we have to be fast.
12:39Turkey as well as entire Europe.
12:41I see also culturally difference also between Europe and Turkey.
12:45As I feel, we are more on the pragmatic side, more agile side.
12:50But the scale is important.
12:53Europe can also bring the scale.
12:55Investment is a must on the grid, on transmission.
12:59But we have to also think about efficiency through digitalization.
13:05It's like managing the traffic, not only with additional roads.
13:10It's managing the traffic, solving the traffic problems with navigation systems.
13:15You've mentioned permission processes, and this would take us to the issue and the aspect of regulations, right?
13:22Which is one of the most important now.
13:25Can I ask you to list, like, what are some of the key regulations that you would name as those that are needed to reduce the costs and scale clean power?
13:34For example, ETS2 for the gas.
13:38We find a way, together with a few member states, France, which are using gas, to bring a three-year delay.
13:45For example, for entire market in my country, bring around 25%, the highest price of the gas.
13:52So that is unaffordable for industry.
13:55And that should be started in 2026.
13:57And I think that discussion should be put in a very pragmatic way about our future of the industry in Europe.
14:04And I think that is the best example.
14:07For transition fuels, like was the coal before, now we have a penalty, which are doubling the price for energy made from coal in my country.
14:16So, in this moment, I think that we should be very clear about gas to keep the same clear regulation and to keep it in the way that was before.
14:26And to take a delay until we take some oxygen to feed our power plants, gas-to-power plants, and to feed our industry.
14:34And that's very clear.
14:35Ms. Berg, what do you think regarding the regulations that I needed?
14:38Would you name as the key ones?
14:41You know, regulation is important in order to speed up.
14:44And I think there are things to be done.
14:46For example, make sure that the same things are not tested in several regulations.
14:51We end up with that sometimes when we want to build something.
14:54That first you have to get an approval according to one regulation and then to another.
14:58And they are overlapping and looking at the same things, but you can get different results.
15:02And it also takes a long time because it's not a clear set of priorities of what actually needs to happen from a more holistic perspective.
15:11For example, when it comes to energy infrastructure related to security or other things.
15:18But I also think it's important to say it's not just individual regulations.
15:22The most important thing is probably stable regulatory and policy frameworks that are long-term because these investments are made in order to be there for many decades.
15:33And the best thing that we can do from a European perspective is to keep an alignment between the countries so that the policy is not differing too much between countries.
15:43Because you need to be able to act on a large market to sort of unlock the economics of this.
15:48And then be really clear on what the targets are until, for example, 2040 and make sure we follow that trajectory.
15:55Because the risk right now discussing back and forth what it's going to be or not and are we going to stick to it or not, that creates uncertainty.
16:03Uncertainty is risk in the investment market and then, you know, investors will hesitate.
16:08So I would say that the clear policy frameworks that are long-term is probably the most important thing.
16:14And then we need all the sort of lightening of the speed in the regulation as well.
16:19Would you like to add to that?
16:20Because I saw you were agreeing with...
16:22No, I was smiling because I have a European partner operating in Turkey.
16:28But apart from this, we invest also in the United States in renewable.
16:31And I have experienced all the permission processes.
16:37Europe has the longest permission or process time from zero to build a new renewable plan in terms of permissions, all the process.
16:49We are trying to make it faster, but we are still faster in Turkey than Europe.
16:53But in the USA, I have an experience in one half a year because the system, the regulation is more on awarding.
17:04I mean, when we think about the carrot and the stick, I see more motivation in the US to speed up compared to Europe.
17:13This was my experience.
17:14That's why I smiled, actually.
17:15Mr. Birol, what do you think on that with the regulation aspect?
17:18We definitely need to, in Europe, simplify the processes, simplification.
17:24I cannot argue that we should completely abolish the regulation.
17:30We should make it simpler and faster, both the licensing and permitting.
17:37But I also want to say one more thing.
17:39We say clean energy, and I think we should agree that clean energy includes renewables, but also nuclear power.
17:46Clean energy is also for Europe, secure energy.
17:50It is for the electricity security, because they are, renewable energy is homegrown.
17:58You don't, I mean, if I put a solar panel on the roof of my, how shall I say, my apartment, my house, my neighbor can do it as well.
18:11I am not stealing from him or her.
18:13So this is a homegrown, and therefore, when we talk about the energy security, I think one of the solutions to energy security is the renewable energy, together with nuclear energy.
18:27This is one issue.
18:29The second, why I'm insisting on the grids, is the following.
18:33I want to give one number, which is, in my view, very shocking, at least for me.
18:37Last year in Europe, we have installed, it was a record, 80 gigawatts of renewable capacity.
18:48This is a good news.
18:49But you know what is the worst news?
18:52More than 400 gigawatts of renewable capacity was ready, but there was no grid.
18:58We couldn't connect to the grid, and it didn't go to the households or the factories.
19:04This is completely crazy.
19:06This is, economically, it doesn't make sense at all, because it's like the, Kuvanchberg talk about the roads and streets.
19:16It's like you build the nicest car, very fast, very nice looking, very efficient and everything, but you forget to build roads for that.
19:25So we built the power plants, but we don't have transmission lines and grids.
19:30This is the biggest problem today in Europe, and of course, building these grids, the Commission has a new grids package.
19:39I hope it will see the light of today, and this will de-block many of the problems that we are facing.
19:47It is the main, in my view, main barrier in front of the electrification of the European economy.
19:53Thank you very much for this.
19:55Thank you very much for joining us.
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