Europe needs to press on with the green transition and resist the temptation to ride out the latest energy shock with open-handed subsidies, the International Monetary Fund said Friday.
“Especially now, Europe must stay the course on its energy sector transformation, raise the share of renewables while integrating the energy sector,” the Fund’s Europe Director Alfred Kammer wrote in a blog post.
The Fund’s recommendations come at a time when soaring energy prices have again inflamed the debate over the right energy strategy for a continent that remains painfully dependent on imported fossil fuels, only four years after the last shock created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Kammer argued that this dependency, together with its failure to integrate its national energy markets, represented a “chronic disadvantage” that had left industrial energy prices almost twice as high as they were at the start of 2022.
