The record-breaking disruption to the global energy supply triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is the main cause of the crisis. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned a daily loss of approximately 13 million barrels. And in just the first 17 days of the Iran war, the EU was forced to spend an additional €6 billion on fossil fuel imports due to soaring prices.
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To ensure energy independence and affordability, Brussels turning its attention back to the nuclear sector, fixing a grid that renewables alone cannot stabilise. This pivot marks a transition toward a strategic “energy mix”, where the reliability of nuclear baseload is being embraced as partner to the volatility of wind and solar.
In a March 2026 address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power”.
AccelerateEU as Europe’s answer to the energy crisis
Energy diversification and the increased use of renewables led to an 11.1 per cent fall in the EU’s energy imports in 2025 compared with 2024. In 2025, Europe imported €336.7 billion in energy products, down 51.4 per cent from 2022, when energy imports stood at €693.4 billion, Eurostat reveals.
The US-Iran conflict shows the EU’s ongoing, heavy reliance on foreign fossil fuel, which intensified with the need to find alternatives to Russian gas after 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led the EU de facto to shift its dependency to liquefied natural gas (LNG), with the US providing 58 per cent of the EU’s overall LNG supplies in 2025.
“What we are seeing now is the early stage of a potentially cascading effect”, according to Rosita Zilli, Policy Director at the European Energy Research Alliance. Energy systems experience time lags, meaning the effects of supply disruptions unfold gradually”, she explained.
On 22 April, the European Commission warned that rising US-Iran war have cost the EU an additional €24 billion in energy imports, even with a steady energy supply. Brussels announced AccelerateEU, a five-pillar initiative to increase energy security and reducing reliance on foreign energy.
Through the 2025 Energy Union Task For, the plan coordinates member states’ gas storage while easing state aid regulations. A Fuel Observatory will track production, import and exports of transport fuel and signal potential shortages.
Measures include actions to support national governments to protect consumers and businesses, like income support schemes and energy vouchers to cut electricity taxes for vulnerable households.
The increase domestic green energy production, the Electrification Action Plan simplifies the electrification of the industry, transport and building sectors make electricity the dominant energy source. With the Grids Plan, Brussels wants to fully modernise the bloc’s energy infrastructure.
The roadmap increases private investments through high-level events, like the Clean Energy Transition Investment Forum in May 2026, and the Clean Energy Investment Summit later this year.
According to Zilli, the Commission’s measures are mainly driven by ongoing geopolitical pressures, showing that the “EU is not yet fully operating with a stable, forward-looking strategy”.
Yet she welcomes Europe’s energy diversification policies, including its plans on nuclear sources. “Nuclear is “a low-carbon, dispatchable source of energy”, she argues, highlighting that it is one of the solutions to detach from fossil fuels, alongside renewable sources.
The logistics of nuclear production
Nuclear energy emerges as a good option. It’s produced by splitting atomic nuclei in a controlled chain reaction, generating heat and steam to drive turbine-generators.
To deliver this at scale, the EU must maintain a full fuel cycle and industrial ecosystem, including uranium supply, conversion, enrichment, fuel, and a fleet of mostly pressurised water reactors. These ensure low-carbon electricity and grid reliability.
France dominates production: it supplies 58 per cent of the EU’s nuclear electricity and depends heavily on it. Other major producers include Spain, Sweden, Finland and Belgium, which together produce around 26 per cent of the output. Countries like Slovakia, Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia and Finland have smaller fleets, despite being the most reliant on nuclear in their national energy mixes.
Collectively though, the EU depends heavily on nuclear power, which generated 24 per cent of electricity in 2026. It currently operates 98 reactors across 12 states with about 96.2 GW of capacity, so the system is developed but constrained.
The system depends on coordinated supply chains, strong regulatory oversight, skilled workforce development, waste management, and long-term financing for construction, operation, and decommissioning. To expand, it needs life extensions for existing plants, new investments in reactors and supply chains, and improvements in financing, workforce capacity and fuel security.
Nuclear as a “sustainable” option
Brussels’ nuclear push is renewed but not unprecedented. It began with the 1957 Euratom Treaty, followed by a major expansion phase from the 1970s to the 1990s when most of today’s reactors were built.
Some countries later turned away from nuclear, like Italy after a 1987 referendum and Germany, which completed its phase-out in 2023 as safety rules tightened following Fukushima (2011).
The effort returned in 2023, as the EU officially integrated nuclear power into the EU Taxonomy to attract private capital. This involves classifying it as “economically sustainable”. In 2024, Brussels presented the Net-Zero Industry Act, granting nuclear projects “strategic” status and 18-month permitting.
The Commission adopted the SMR Strategy in March 2026, which introduced a €200 million investment guarantee to accelerate the deployment of Small Modular Reactors. And current policy, supported by the 2025 Nuclear Illustrative Programme, identifies a €241 billion investment requirement to maintain and expand the reactor fleet.
There’s also a France-led group of EU states driving this expansion. It’s called the 12-nation Nuclear Alliance and includes Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Estonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Belgium, and Italy. Their goal is to reach 150 GW of nuclear power capacity by 2050, by accelerating SMR deployment and securing access to funding for nuclear projects.
Their rival is the “Friends of Renewables,” a coalition led by Germany that opposes including nuclear energy in the same category as wind or solar power. Criticisms of nuclear include high costs and long timelines for construction, along with the unresolved long-term management of radioactive waste and the sensitivity of public opinion regarding safety.
Renewables are a must
Set for adoption at the end of the year, the Commission’s post-2030 energy framework aims to increase the supply of reliable, affordable, domestic energy. The target is a 90 per cent reduction in emissions by 2040.
Renewables are key as they provide electricity, heating, and transport by minimising dependence on fossil fuels.
“While nuclear provides dispatchable power, new projects remain capital-intensive and take time to deploy, which is why renewables continue to drive most of the short-term transition”, Zilli told Euronews.
The share of green power in the EU’s energy mix reached 25.2 per cent in 2024, up from 24.4 per cent the previous year. Sweden led the charge with a gross clean energy consumption of 62.5 per cent, while Belgium (14.3 per cent) and Luxemburg (14.7 per cent) fell behind.
In 2025, the EU’s effort to increase clean energy amounted to around €333.4 billion, according to the IEA.
Europe has set higher targets.
The revised Renewable Energy Directive (EU/2023/2413) wants to increase the share of green energy to at least 42.5 per cent, with a target of 45 per cent by 2030. This builds on the €300 billion REPowerEU initiative, which boosted renewables to 45.3 per cent of EU electricity in 2023, a 4.1-percentage-point jump and the largest increase in a decade.
The EU needs to double past rates of renewable deployment, according to the European Environment Agency. In 2025, electricity generation was 37.5 per cent wind, 27.5 per cent solar, 25.9 per cent hydro, and 8.5 per cent combustible renewables, Eurostat found.
AccelerateEU is set to drive this increase. By summer 2026, the Commission will present an Electrification Action Plan, outlining electrification targets to break down barriers in the industrial, transport, and building sectors.
The swift implementation of the Sustainable Transport Investment Plan to speed up the deployment of green aviation fuel is also on the agenda.
Without a modern grid system stretching 11 million kilometres, the push for renewables falls short.
“Grid infrastructure is clearly one of the key bottlenecks of the energy transition. Much of Europe’s grid is ageing, often between 40 and 50 years old, and was not designed for a highly electrified, decentralised energy system”, Zilli warned.
The Commission wants to approve the Grids Package by summer 2026 to tackle slow permitting and connectivity challenges. The package focuses on enhancing renewable energy infrastructure by repowering large wind farms and renewable plants, including offshore wind and hydropower installations, to accelerate clean energy deployment.
LNG and Green Hydrogen, energy underdogs
Beyond nuclear and renewables, the EU is integrating Natural Gas/LNG and Green Hydrogen as critical additional options. The EU Energy Hub manages both, to sum up demand and keep member states from outbidding each other on the global market.
Even as the EU transitions away from fossil fuels, LNG remains the primary tool for replacing lost Russian gas. This is supported by the REPowerEU framework, which funds the expansion of floating regasification terminals and interconnectors.
Green hydrogen is the “clean alternative” for heavy industries like steel and chemicals that cannot run on electricity alone.
It’s produced by using renewable energy to split water, creating a zero-carbon fuel. To scale this, the EU uses the European Hydrogen Bank, a subsidy mechanism that covers the “green premium” (price gap between expensive hydrogen and cheap fossil fuels) to make clean fuel commercially attractive to the private sector.
Europe needs a mix of solutions
While the EU is heading in the right direction, political turbulence is making progress feel more as a reactive move than a long-term strategy, said Zilli.
According to Zilli, renewables and nuclear sources won’t fix Europe’s energy security alone. Energy sufficiency must be a core part of the bloc’s energy strategy.
“It is not about reducing economic output, but about using energy more efficiently within the system’s elasticity, without destroying value”, Zilli explained.
Zilli also warned that while the EU’s target of 45.5 per cent of renewable energy by 2030 serves as a crucial benchmark, it is ambitious and challenging to meet. Europe’s outdated grid threatens its renewable energy goals. Without upgrades, the integration and distribution of new electricity sources will remain a major challenge, she warned.
