Europe's Energy Trilemma - Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA

Guest

Dan Jørgensen

European Commissioner for Energy and Housing

Transcript

Dan Jørgensen: We are under pressure with regards to our competitiveness because even though I’ve given you some numbers already, and I will add to them in a minute of why it’s going in the right direction still, we do pay too much power energy in Europe primarily because we are dependent on fossil fuel from other countries.

Jason Bordoff: The European Union’s energy landscape is transforming rapidly as the block works to reduce emissions, lower energy prices, and decrease dependence on Russian fuel. Three goals that are proving to be a challenging balance. Though renewables now generate nearly half of Europe’s electricity. Significant challenges remain lengthy. Permitting processes are stalling. The deployment of new clean generation and infrastructure and the continent requires improvements in energy system interconnections between countries and questions persist about the role of certain forms of energy like nuclear power and hydrogen in Europe’s future energy mix. So how is Europe addressing these competing priorities and what do certain trade-offs mean for energy, affordability, security, and economic competitiveness?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Jason Bordoff. Today on the show, Dan Jørgensen, the brand new European Commissioner for Energy and Housing Commissioner Jørgensen previously served as Danish Minister for Development Cooperation and Minister for Global Climate Policy. He’s a member of the Social Democratic Party of Denmark and was a member of the Danish Parliament from 2015 to 2024. Commissioner Jørgensen joined me to discuss Europe’s multifaceted energy strategy, accelerating renewables, improving efficiency, and addressing affordability concerns. We also discussed the European Union’s efforts to reduce Russian energy imports and how the EU is navigating relationships with the United States and other global partners. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Commissioner Dan Jorgenson, thank you so much for making time to be with us in your very busy schedule in your new role. It’s good to see you again, sir.

Dan Jørgensen: Thank you so much, Jason. It’s great to be with you. I do try and listen to your podcast once in a while and I always enjoy it, so thank you for having me.

Jason Bordoff: Well, you’ve been on before several years ago and I’ve been on yours, so I appreciate the opportunity to keep the exchange going Every time we talk. It seems like you have yet another important role and the world seems even more complicated than it was the last time we talked, so

Dan Jørgensen: Hopefully those two things are not correlated.

Jason Bordoff: I just want to start by making sure our listeners understand your job today. There’s a lot of national governments, there’s a lot of energy ministers in Europe, but talk about the role of the European Union, the energy Commissioner, and talk about in a few months now what it’s representing the entirety of the EU as opposed to just one member country.

Dan Jørgensen: Sure. So basically we have three main institutions in the European Union, the commission, the council and the European Parliament. And you could say that the council and the Parliament is comparable to your Congress and the council would then be your Senate because the councilors where the ministers represent their countries and one country has one minister, as I think your states have two senators and no matter the size of the state that’s the same in Europe. So France has one commissioner and Denmark has one commissioner. Then there’s the parliament where you have a number of seats that correl it to your size. So Germany has far more members than Denmark, for instance, and when we make legislation, those two chambers if you will, they need to agree. So it’s a cogitative procedure on most issues, certainly on most issues related to my field, which is energy.

And then we have the commission. The commission is a European body in the sense that even though I’m appointed by the Danish government, I don’t represent Danish interests as a commissioner, I represent the union, as does my colleagues that also have their respective portfolio. So I’m energy commissioner, we also have a trade commissioner, a transport commissioner, and so forth, and we make decisions as a college and we have monopoly on putting forward new proposals for legislation, meaning that when we want to do something on energy for instance, it is us that draft the legislation and is then the co legislators in the council and the parliament that negotiated and adopted. In the end, we are also responsible for overseeing the implementation of legislation. So when member states get the legislation and make sure that it then actually leads to real difference and that it’s implemented, they do that very well often, but if they don’t, then the commission has the obligation to make sure that the member stage supply, that’s more or less we have other assignments also. But that’s basically the shortest description I think.

Jason Bordoff: And let’s start at the high level and then we’ll go into specific issues. But you in my view seem to have close to an impossible job. You’ve been tasked by Ursula of Erline, but doing three things at the same time, lowering emissions, lowering energy prices, and bringing Russian gas to Europe to zero. How do you do all three of those at the same time? And if you need to prioritize one of those goals over another, which one wins out?

Dan Jørgensen: Well, I’m not saying that is no trade-offs at all. Of course there is, but I will actually say that the good news here is that yes, it’s a complex situation. Yes, these three huge challenges are indeed a tall order, but the solutions are actually the same. So what do we do? Well first and we deploy far more renewable energy faster. Second, we have to become much more energy efficient and thirdly, connected to the first two points. We need to be much better connected as a union. So our electricity systems, our energy systems needs to be better connected already now we save more than 30 billion euros a year on being connected. Take a country like the one I know best, Denmark. So we have a very high degree of renewable energy in our energy systems. For instance, on a good day when the wind is blowing, we produce far more than a hundred percent of the electricity that we need on wind alone.

So what we have in surplus, we then export to the countries around us then country on other days when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, we then get energy from Germany or Sweden. And similarly, other countries in Europe are connected some better than others. But all in all, because we are connected and we can use each other’s energy systems and exploit the synergies, we actually save, as I said, more than 30 billion euros every year. But we are not at all exploiting the possibilities that we actually have. If we do it even better and make sure that we have more physical infrastructure, so more interconnectors, better grids and exploit the ones that we have better by using digital technology, AI and other things, we will be able to become even more efficient in the future.

Jason Bordoff: I mean that’s a great list, efficiency renewables and more interconnected with the grid. So how do you achieve those things? There was a massive report many of our listeners will be familiar with from Mario o Draghi about European competitiveness. I saw a comment you made for some political positions, you have to swear an oath on the Bible in the European commission. I had to swear on the draggy report. And there are a lot of recommendations in that report, including spending massive amounts of money at the same time that the European Union has to spend more on defense and a range of other priorities. We saw that with changes in the German government recently. So talk about the actions you take and one of them is spending, where’s that money going to come from?

Dan Jørgensen: Well, obviously energy is not free and it will not be free anytime soon, may probably never. So yes, you can look at this as a very expensive transition. We are moving away from fossils into renewables, but you can also look at it at the smartest investment we will ever make because instead of spending money on buying fossils that we then buy and use and then buy some new ones and use, we invest in our own energy, we invest in renewables. And can I just give you one figure? The amount that it would cost us to buy 2,400 F 35 fighter jets produced in the US for instance, not for instance, they are in the US if we wanted to do that, the amount for that equals the amount that we’ve spent buying fossil fuels from Russia since February 22. That is obviously totally unacceptable and that’s just a good example of why we need to be independent of Russian fuel. We will not in the future support Russian in any way help fill up Putin’s war chest. That’s unacceptable. At the same time, it’s not good economy. We need to be independent of fossil fuel, expensive fossil fuels and use more renewables.

Jason Bordoff: And can you talk a little bit about where the political landscape in Europe stands for this? Five years ago you had President VO derling introducing with broad public support, which he called the European green deal, and many of those goals are not on track five years later and now you had the energy sector disruption, the outbreak of war on Europe’s doorstep, farmer protests, pushback on accelerated introduction of things like heat pumps. To what extent do the politics in Europe still support what you’re talking about?

Dan Jørgensen: Well, let’s look at what’s actually happening and then talk politics afterwards. So if we look at what’s actually happening last year we deployed 78 gigawatts of new installed wind and solar capacity. All in all, 48% of our electricity came from renewables last year. And for the first time ever we got more energy from solar than we got from coal. So in that sense it’s going fast in the right direction. And on the other hand though, and this is also something that relates to your more political question, on the other hand we are not doing it fast enough and we do see some opposition in some countries on expanding renewables. And it is also true that when we look at the European Parliament elections last year, some of the political parties that think the green transition is going too fast did gain some support. I will bottom line say though that if you listen to this commission, president on the line has said it very clearly, and I’ll repeat it here today.

There will be no backtracking on the green transition. On the contrary, we will be fast tracking it and for me it’s very clearly also about decarbonizing our economies and fighting climate change. And I don’t think that that obligation has become smaller in the recent months because if some countries step back on this agenda and the rest of us needs to step forward, but even if I didn’t care about climate change, even if I didn’t believe what I do believe, then I would still recommend many of the same measures because as I said, it’s the cheapest form of energy force and it’s our possibility of becoming independent. It’s our possibility of producing our own energy. So therefore this is also about security. And that’s also why I think I can say pretty clearly that if you are a green investor, Europe is the safe place to go because we will not change our opinion even with the election results that were last year, even with the sentiments and the political sphere that are sometimes being put forward that maybe we shouldn’t do what we are doing, it doesn’t really change our cost because it is the smart thing to do.

Jason Bordoff: There is a real sense of concern in Europe about economic competitiveness. Energy prices is an important part of that. As Draghi mentioned several times in his report, and you did see European gas demand go down a lot after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some of that was renewable, some voluntary conservation, but there was a meaningful amount of industry involuntary destruction and demand because of high prices. So can you talk about what the concrete policy steps look like with a frame now of this clean industrial deal? How quickly do you expect results to be seen and what is the real business case underpinning it? How do you accelerate that particularly as regards the industrial activity in Europe?

Dan Jørgensen: Yeah, well lemme start by acknowledging the fact that we are under pressure with regards to our competitiveness because even though I’ve given you some numbers already and I will add to them in a minute of why it’s going in the right direction still, we do pay too much power energy in Europe primarily because we are dependent on fossil fuel from other countries. But yes, this is a problem for us and we need to do more to solve it. One thing that we will do is that we will decouple the gas price from the electricity price. Now it becomes a little bit technical, but I’m sure your listeners will be able to follow this. So in Europe, our electricity prices are coupled to the gas prices because when you bid on energy in the European energy market, it’s the most expensive energy that determines the price at that exact moment.

And that will usually be gas. So when the price of gas goes up, the price of renewables also go up. And this is good because that marginal pricing system, first of all it secures our security of supply, but second, it also creates the right incentives to produce as cheap as you can because you then have a marginal profit. Now of course for the market players and for the consumers of energy, especially industry, this is potentially quite hurtful when the prices fluctuate. Therefore we have to find ways of decoupling not on the wholesale level. And you won’t hear probably, I think many people argue for doing that, but on the retail level and that you can do with different economic financial instruments like PPAs and CFDs. And we will do that. And one of the things that we’ve proposed now is also de-risking instrument together with the European investment bank for PPAs.

And then of course it’s about again, fast tracking the renewables. So even though it’s already going fast in the right direction, we need to do even more. So we are looking at our permitting rules. This is something I know you can relate to also in the US that yeah, things take time and sometimes there’s a good reason for it, but quite often that’s not, it’s red tape and we need to do something about it. So I’ve said, and we’ve said in the commission that right now, sometimes quite often actually it’ll take five, seven or even a decade to get a permit in the future, we don’t want it to take more than six months. Now if we succeed in doing that, that will be a little bit of a revolution actually, I will say with regards to fast tracking renewables.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, huge challenge here too. As and just again, coming back to my first question so our listeners understand whether it’s changing the decoupling electricity prices or red tape and permitting, how should people understand what can be done in Brussels and what has to be done in national capitals throughout Europe?

Dan Jørgensen: Yeah, so this is an extremely good question and there’s no simple answer to that because on one hand, yes, the energy mix of a country is national competence. So it’s up to Germany and the Netherlands and Sweden and Denmark and Portugal, how they want to produce their own energy. On the other hand, we are regulated in a common framework. So we have the ECS system which regulates the carbon emissions from our energy and industry. We have legislation on how to reduce emissions from a broad range of sectors. Also, we have a regulation that regulates and makes sure that we have an even playing field in our electricity markets and we have regulation that makes sure that we have this interconnectiveness. So just to mention a few, there’s a lot and it’s complex. And what we are looking at right now is how can we make sure that first of all it’s simplified in the future, but at the same time and there might be a trade off, we become even more connected.

Because right now, yes, we are very well connected compared to any region in the world, certainly the US and that’s good, but we can do even better actually, if you compare to let’s say transport sector, imagine that we had 200, this is just an arbitrary fictional number. Let’s say we had 200 roads connecting Europe. The situation in the energy sector is like, okay, so we have 200 roads but we need 400 and we are only utilizing, we’re only using a hundred of them, so we need to use the ones that we have much better, much more efficient, and we need to expand really our grids quite significantly. And that is of course not without challenges and it needs more legislation, hopefully simpler and easy to implement legislation.

Jason Bordoff: You talked about how it’s hurtful when gas prices fluctuate, particularly because of you haven’t yet decoupled electricity prices. So that can be set the marginal price, that volatility, that fluctuation has gone up, not down because one of the ways Europe coped with Russia’s, the loss of Russian gas was increased dependence on the global LNG market and that’s just exposes Europe to more market volatility and potentially higher prices. So can you talk about the role of gas in this transition? You’re talking about the role of LNG, which is controversial for some on the left, and how do you think about security of supply and does it make sense to use public funds to invest in LNG contracts, LNG projects, AB abroad from a security of supply perspective?

Dan Jørgensen: Okay, so here we are dealing with one of those issues where there are trade-offs because on one hand we are actually in the process of moving away from fossils including gas, including LNG. But this is obviously not something that we can do from one day till the next. And as somebody who served as minister for energy in a member state, Denmark, when the crisis hit, I know just how serious it is. I had to with my staff work around the clock for a long time to make plans for which part of our industry we would have to close down by force if Putin closed for his gas supply to Europe. So this was the start of the war. Later of course we pulled our act together in Europe and we deployed a lot of policies where we are now not afraid of him closing for the gas.

We are actively pursuing not to buy his gas. But it is, just to give you the context, this is not easy and you are also touching on a real problem for us, which is that okay, so now we’ve actually managed to decrease our dependency. We’ve gone from 45% of our gas being rushing to now around 13% and we want to go to zero. But this means that we are then of course buying more gas from other sources, Norway being the biggest exporter of gas to Europe, but actually the US being number two. And that is clear that that is also putting us in a vulnerable situation, but we consider Norway and US and Qatar friends as opposed to Putin who is an aggressor in war in our continent.

Jason Bordoff: I’m pleased to hear you consider the US a friend and we do have an administration that is kind of using things like tariffs and exports in different ways. And to what extent when you see things like the threat of tariffs as a tool of coercion to extract concessions from other countries, does that make one more concerned about dependence on the US or do you still view us LNG as a reliable source of supply?

Dan Jørgensen: Well, I will say this first and foremost, that tariffs are not good for anybody. Tariffs hurt businesses. They consumers, ordinary people, they hurt countries, they make us all less prosperous than we could have been. So it’s certainly not us looking for a trade fight. So if it happens and when it happens, then obviously we will engage and we will have measures to also take. But it’s not something that we wish and we don’t think it’s in the interest of anybody with regards to diversification of our energy imports. We still count on the US of course, we deal with companies on the market that has supplied and been very, very helpful during the crisis also being able to deliver very fast. And I know that they of course also make money on this and I’m not naive, but I will say after having met with many of them that it is my clear impression that they also do it because they feel an obligation to help Europe in this very difficult time. So again, not being naive, just saying that I have actually felt comforted when meeting many of the CEOs of many of the big companies saying, we think it’s terrible what’s happening in Europe and we are happy that we are able to help.

Jason Bordoff: You talked about the need to bring Russian gas imports down ideally to zero. As you know, LNG imports from Russia went up slightly last year. And with those economic competitiveness pressures and the desire to get energy as cheap as possible, I understand why government policy positions and the Brussels position will be, we cannot import gas from Russia. But as you know, there are a lot of people who believe these end up being companies that make contracts and make their own decisions. There are a lot of people who believe that Russian gas is going to go up for how comes into Europe because it’s just so cheap. Is there a reason that wouldn’t happen? Maybe I’ll ask the question that way. If it turns out to be cheaper than the alternatives and what are the tools that you have to do that?

Dan Jørgensen: Well, it’s my job to make sure that it doesn’t, so I will be presenting a roadmap quite soon and I cannot go too much into the instruments that we have, but of course we do have instruments that we can use. And I will also say that if we look at it, although I’m far from being satisfied and I’m sure many Europeans feel the same way as I do, then we do also have to applaud what we’ve been able to do in Europe because I don’t know of that many other parts of the world where you would be able to fundamentally transform such a big part of your energy system so fast as we’ve done, remember we got 45% of our gas from Russia in 22, now we get 13. And yes, it’s true that last year it went up a little bit. We went down to 15% and then up to 19% that spike was due to LNG from Russia.

And that of care of course then makes it even more important that we act now we are down to 13 now, probably a little bit less even because the transmission of gas via Ukraine stopped 1st of January and we were able to make sure that that did not lead to any security of supply issues for member states because you are of course, right, that one thing is stating a political objective, although it’s a quite important one and it has to do with security, which I think most people understand still, if people are not able to heat their homes or companies have to close down, then of course that’s something that we cannot just let happen. So we need to work very hard on diversifying. And of course also getting our consumption down by other means. I mean we have countries that are using biogas that are produced locally, which is also good for the farming sector by the way, good for reducing emissions by the way, we have energy efficiency tools that has been used. We have electrification something that is very, very good for competitiveness in any circumstance. So there’s a whole range of different tools that we can use.

Jason Bordoff: I have to say commissioner, I’m pleased to hear how often you’ve referenced energy efficiency because when people look at all the sources of energy and where’s it going to come from and we want to be more secure and domestic oil and gas if you have it or renewables, and we often forget energy efficiency and the huge opportunities there as a sort of a missing ingredient in this. So

Dan Jørgensen: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean it’s a little bit strange how that is not something that’s discussed more. I mean maybe it’s as simple as it’s easier to talk about the wind turbines and solar panel farms. So I don’t know. And it’s not as easy to talk about a small thermostat or a small thing that you put into a machine in a factory that will then save you 15% of the energy of that machine use. I mean there’s so many technical opportunities out there that will reduce your consumption of energy so fast. And if we look at energy efficiency investments, usually in private homes they pay back within seven to 10 years. In industry it’s much lower than that. It’s probably around five years on average. So you invest in something in your production and it pays back in five years and after that it’s just extra profits for you. So yes, energy efficiency is hugely important.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah. One question of course is how government can help or should help that is it standards and mandates? And sometimes there’s pushback against that because the upfront costs may be a little bit higher. It could be sending the right price signals with say a carbon tax, but again, that is not popular and we saw druggie actually encourage reduction of taxes on energy. It was a competitiveness problem. So how do you send those signals to people?

Dan Jørgensen: Yeah, no, that is true. It is complex and I’ve also recommended countries to lower the prices on electricity, but I haven’t recommended anybody to lower the prices on the taxes on oil and coal for instance. I mean what you need is a pricing mechanism that gives the rights incentives for the green transition and thereby also for making more efficient systems and cheaper energy. Now, some of this is done on a European level. We have DEGS that you know, which is a hugely successful mechanism, but there are also member states, Denmark is one example that has carbon taxing on top of that in Denmark. They’ve even just decided to also expand that for the agriculture sector. Not an easy task, but it’s been done. And I think that I’m not opposed to regulation. I think that that will very often be the most efficient tool, but I do think that when you can use the market so to speak, and send market signals and have market-based instruments like carbon taxing is, then I think that that is by far the best way of going about it.

Jason Bordoff: And just say a word for our listeners about how you’re moving forward with the carbon border adjustment mechanism, which intends to level the playing field for your businesses with what you’re doing domestically since you mentioned a carbon tax that Europe has.

Dan Jørgensen: So the reason for this tax is that when we tax our own production, how do we then award carbon leakage? How do we award that? We then just get steel from China or Turkey or other countries where they don’t have the same legislation and they don’t have to live up to the same rules. Then we get the steel with the same emissions that we had before and we close our own production. That’s not good for anybody, not our economy, not the climate. So when we set very strict rules for our own production, we have to have some sort of an arrangement to make sure that if you want to then export to the European market, you also need to follow some rules. Now this is not easy either, obviously. And I’m very cognizant that some countries see this as a trade barrier. It is not and it’s never intended to be. And we are also very willing to look at whether or not we can simplify it. My colleague commissioner has put forward ideas on how to make it much simpler so that less companies will be affected, but we will more or less have the same effects in reducing emissions, which is what we want.

Jason Bordoff: I want to ask you about renewables. You talked about how dramatic the growth has been roughly half of the energy in Europe, which is by far the world leader and pretty remarkable numbers. And you tied that to security of supply. We want to produce energy domestically and then that can extend to how people think about supply chains and how much of the clean energy products like solar panels are made in other countries, particularly China, Europe has flagship companies. Well for like TED and Vestus, Siemens Energy and the wind businesses there have been really troubled. The wind industry is in a tough place. So can you talk a little bit about what should be done can be done to bring some relief to that, to help those industries in Europe? Do they where you still possess domestic capacity?

Dan Jørgensen: Yeah, can I start by just making a more general point, which is that it’s not only in Europe that it’s going fast with deployment of new renewables. This of course very well Jason, but just for our listeners, last year globally investments of more than 2 trillion US dollars was made in renewables. So every time $1 was invested in fossil fuels, $2 was invested in renewable energy. And that also means that if we look at India or China, they are really also investing massively and fast in renewables, which is good for the planet obviously and good for the population of those countries. You point to a potential challenge for us, which is that we don’t produce all of the technology that we use ourselves. That is true and it’s also one of our political goals and objectives to change that situation. We want to be better at producing more of these technologies in Europe.

How do we do that? Well, one of the main ways of doing it is my firm belief is that we need to be the part of the world where we are most innovative, where we are on the front of also actually implementing the solutions because that’s what makes us probably different from so many other places in the world that okay, yeah, you’re making green hydrogen many other places, but hopefully we will be the first region in the world where we also has it as an integrated part of our energy system that has unfortunately not happened yet and it’s going too slow, but it is one of our political objectives and then I hope we will deliver on it.

Jason Bordoff: If you want more domestic production, electricity, demand, use of electricity to grow. And many businesses, particularly AI and data centers want that to be firm power, dispatchable power that would take many people to think nuclear has an important role to play that’s controversial in Europe. But can you talk about the role of nuclear today and is that going to be a source of growth to meet the goals you’re talking about?

Dan Jørgensen: Well, nuclear is certainly also controversial in Europe. We have some countries that are opposed to it and don’t want it. We even have some countries that think that other countries shouldn’t have it either. And on the opposite, we have countries that think that this is the most important energy source and we even have some countries there that thinks that they should also force it on others. So yeah, this is a pretty difficult part of my job to try and find common solutions. The slogan of the European Union is united in diversity and this is certainly an issue where that is the case. I do hope that we’ll find ways of discussing this and find better solutions of integrating both renewables and nuclear in our common systems because we will need nuclear in the future. So I come from a country that doesn’t have a nuclear, I don’t think we will get it in Denmark.

I don’t think it’s necessary in Denmark. I would also be opposed to it in Denmark. We have so many other opportunities, but I also do accept that if we are to reach our goals of decarbonizing our economies as fast as we want, and by the way also globally, the IPCC in their scenarios also state very clearly that then nuclear is a part of the solution. So what does it look like in Europe? Well, if we look at the next 10 years or so, probably the production will decline because there’s quite a few power plants around Europe that needs to be renovated. Some even probably closed down. So right now we produce around 99 gigawatts of electricity from nuclear, and in 10 years we’ll probably be at 88 or something like that, and then that will go up again. And then in mid-century we’ll be approximately where we are now at around a hundred gigawatts.

Now this is what we estimate right now, the commission estimates right now on the basis of the plans that we have been getting in from the different member states. Can this change? Yes, of course it can. On the other hand, building a new renewable, sorry, power plant for nuclear is not something you do from one day till the next. So I think the biggest unknown here is how much will small modular reactors mean? Will we be able to deploy them fast? If that is the case, then that might change the picture and we definitely looking into the possibilities of that. That is by the way, also one of the areas where we are hoping to be able to work closely together with the US because that’s also, we certainly don’t agree on everything and renewables is obviously one of them, but maybe small modular reactors, especially fourth generation is interesting because we don’t have the same problems with security and waste.

Jason Bordoff: Nuclear and renewables are really helpful in providing electricity. Electricity can do a lot, but of course it can’t do everything until you electrify things with heat pumps, et cetera. So one of the things Europe did is it had very ambitious goals for hydrogen, green hydrogen in particular. And it’s pretty far away I think from meeting those goals, it’s fair to say. So can you talk a little bit about what your plans are to try to boost momentum? If you still think the 20 million tons or anywhere close to it is still important to get hydrogen off the ground?

Dan Jørgensen: Oh, I definitely do. So I think probably our energy systems in the future will be primarily driven on electrons, but we will also need some molecules and we don’t want them to be from fossils. So what to do? Well, hydrogen certainly seems to be a very important part of the solution. What happens is in the ideal world, we will use renewables to produce electricity. We will then via an electrolyzer make that into hydrogen, and the hydrogen can then be used as a storage, for instance, so that when we have a surplus of wind, for instance, and at nighttime and the North Sea, you store the energy by making it into hydrogen, you can then add carbon to the hydrogen and then you can have fuels that you can use in your aviation sector or in the maritime sector. So those hard to abate sectors, but hydrogen will also be key in our heavy energy intensive industries probably. And we already see this now in steel production and I expect we’ll see it in the future also more in the chemical industry and other of those high intensive energy using industries.

Jason Bordoff: I wanted to ask you just quickly, almost out of time, but the physical infrastructure and cybersecurity, the sabotage of Nord Stream was a stark reminder of how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is. How do you think about the threats to undersea cables, pipelines, transmission, cyber? What is the commission doing? What should policymakers be doing with international cooperation presumably as well?

Dan Jørgensen: Yeah, so this has many dimensions. I spoke to the energy minister of Ukraine recently about this because they are also expanding their renewable energy. And for them that makes sense from a security perspective also because it’s much harder to hit 10 separate wind turbines with massage than it is to hit a power plant. So that’s of course an aspect of security policy that in many ways renewable energy facilities will be more difficult for your enemies to hit. But on the other hand, it’s also clear that having a very electrified system and having a very digitalized system makes us vulnerable. I mean, cables can be ruined as we’ve seen. Cyber attacks can make us vulnerable. So this is something that we take very seriously and that we are also working on trying to prevent. I am sure you can understand why many of those things are not that suitable to speak about in a podcast, but we are working also with NATO of course, and certainly with our armed forces and cybersecurity units of the member states on these issues.

Jason Bordoff: Finally, I hear and understand a little bit of caution in how your response to some of my questions about our new Trump administration, but I am just curious as a Danish citizen what you think of the whole Greenland issue.

Dan Jørgensen: Well, we have obviously in Denmark, a very, very close connection to the part of the Danish kingdom that is Greenland. And we respect very much that also the Greenlandic people have an ambition to become independent. But we think that that needs to be the decision after Greenlandic people and certainly not something that other countries can force upon them. So I think that would be my most diplomatic and correct response to that question.

Jason Bordoff: Commissioner Jørgensen, you have a hard and important job always important, but perhaps never more so than now, and hopefully some of the work and the research that our scholars do here will be helpful to inform you and your colleagues at the commission. Please let us know how we can help, and good luck to you and thanks for joining us.

Dan Jørgensen: I’m sure it will, Jason, and thank you so much.

Jason Bordoff: Thank you again, commissioner Jorgenson, and thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by me, Jason Bordoff and by Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Dave Turk, John Elkind, Anne-Sophie Corbeau, Caroline Pittman and Kyu Lee. Sean Marquand engineered the show. For more information about the podcast or the Center on Global Energy policy, please visit us [email protected] or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, it really helps us out. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.

The European Union’s energy landscape is transforming rapidly, as the bloc works to reduce emissions, lower energy prices, and decrease dependence on Russian fuel—three goals proving to be a challenge.

Though renewables now generate nearly half of Europe’s electricity, significant challenges remain.Lengthy permitting processes are stalling the deployment of new clean generation and infrastructure and the continent requires improvements in energy system interconnections between countries. And questions remain about the role of certain forms of energy, like nuclear power and hydrogen, in Europe’s future energy mix.

So how is Europe addressing these competing priorities? And what do certain trade-offs mean for energy affordability, security, and economic competitiveness?

This week host Jason Bordoff talks with Dan Jørgensen, the new European commissioner for energy and housing.

Commissioner Jørgensen previously served as Danish minister for development cooperation and minister for global climate policy. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Denmark and was a member of the Danish parliament from 2015 to 2024.

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