The European Commission has published an electrification action plan built around a single number. It wants electricity to account for 46 percent of the EU's total energy consumption by 2040, up from about 23 percent today. TLDR News EU's explainer lays out the reasoning, then spends its second half explaining why that number is unlikely to be reached. The plan covers permitting reform, direct public funding, financial instruments to pull in private capital, and a change to how the upfront cost of new grid and generation lands on household bills. The video reports that the target is not legally binding. Its framing is that Europe has made real progress on cleaning up electricity supply and almost none on shifting demand onto it.
Strip out the institutional language and the plan is mostly about one ratio. The video says electricity currently costs roughly three times as much as gas across the EU, with wide variation between member states, and that the Commission wants to push it to parity or below. For anyone weighing a heat pump against a gas boiler, or working out whether home charging genuinely beats a tank of petrol, that ratio is the whole argument. Efficiency gains do not help if the per unit price gap is large enough to cancel them out. It also explains why tax gets a mention. The video notes that electricity is taxed more heavily than gas in some member states, which is a national decision rather than a Brussels one. A non binding target does not rewrite anybody's tax code, and the plan depends on governments the Commission cannot compel.
The mechanics are worth reading past the headline figure. According to the video, the Commission wants to raise investment sharply, because electrification is capital intensive up front even though the electricity itself ends up cheap. That means permitting reform to make building easier, money from the EU and national governments, and policy banks including what the video names as the Industrial Decarbonisation Bank lending to companies building electricity infrastructure. The video also describes a plan to spread capital costs over a longer horizon rather than letting energy companies recover them immediately through bills, partly for price stability and partly so that investment-driven spikes do not erode public support.
The arithmetic is where the video earns its keep. It reports that renewables generated roughly half of the EU's electricity last year according to the think tank Ember, with wind and solar together overtaking fossil fuels for the first time. Consumption tells a different story. Electricity's share of total energy use rose from 19 percent to 23 percent across the 15 years to 2025, and reaching 46 percent by 2040 would mean adding 23 points in a comparable span, which the video calculates as moving more than five times faster. It also makes a point that is easy to miss. Because electric cars use around 18 percent of the energy petrol cars do, getting electricity to 46 percent of car-related energy consumption would require roughly 80 percent of Europe's cars to be electric. On the upside, the video says the Commission claims the target would cut EU CO2 emissions by more than 2,000 megatonnes and reduce the fossil fuel import bill by 260 billion euros a year by 2040.
Bottom line: this is a target designed to be aimed at rather than hit, and there is nothing wrong with that provided everyone stays honest about it. The genuinely useful part of the plan is not the 46 percent, it is the pricing work: spreading capital costs over longer horizons and stopping member states taxing electricity harder than gas. Those are unglamorous, achievable, and would do more for real electrification than any headline percentage. Watch what happens to electricity duty in individual national budgets over the next two years. That is the actual scoreboard.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.