Industrial Alliances for the Energy Transition: Harnessing Business Power in the Era of Geoeconomics

Russia’s aggression of Ukraine spurred EU action to speed up the energy transition. At the same time, it heightened concerns about technological leadership and the new dependencies this developments could bring. In this context, one of the key priorities of the New EU Industrial Policy is building an industrial ecosystem with the capacity to act at the forefront of the energy transition without relying on foreign resources, while tackling the issue of dependencies in strategic sectors. However, it is not clear whether and how such developments affect the relationship between the EU and European business actors. To what extent is the private sector aligned with the EU goal of strategic autonomy in the green tech sector? And to what extent the EU can shape business actors strategies in a geoeconomic world order? This paper provides a preliminary answer to these questions focusing on three industrial alliances occupying the EU industrial landscape in the renewable energy sector as case studies: the European battery Alliance (EBA), the European Raw Materials Alliance (ERMA), and the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance (ECH2A). The focus on these alliances is justified considering their being an instance of the European adaptation to a new geostrategic environment and the sectors’ reliance on global value chains from which the EU aims to divert.