The European Commission’s AccelerateEU energy crisis plan endorses a target of 200 GW of battery storage by 2030, but does not propose a specific financing mechanism to achieve this, according to SolarPower Europe (SPE), which calls for a separate EU-wide auction funded by revenues from emissions trading.
The European Commission’s new AccelerateEU package supports a target of 200 GW of battery storage by 2030, but SolarPower Europe says the plan still lacks the dedicated financing mechanism needed to translate that ambition into implementation.
SolarPower Europe says the block would still only reach around 160 GW in 2030 under the medium scenario, falling short of the target even after a sixfold increase from the installed 77 GWh at the end of 2024.
“No, we need a separate instrument, funded by ETS revenues that are part of the ETS revision in July,” said Dries Acke, deputy CEO of SolarPower Europe, when asked whether AccelerateEU can close the funding gap identified by the association.
SPE is calling for part of the European Commission’s proposed €30 billion ($35.1 billion) ETS Investment Booster – a fund financed by around 400 million EU ETS allowances – to be spent on an EU-wide auction for battery storage and non-fossil flexibility.
The European Commission’s communication, published this week, sets a target to expand storage capacity in the EU from 55 GW today to 200 GW by 2030, describing batteries as playing “an important role” in that growth.
It proposes a Clean Energy Investment Summit, focused on storage, among other things, and general support from the European Investment Bank. It contains no specific procurement mechanism, no auction framework and no mandatory obligation for Member States for the deployment of storage.
The lack of obligations at national level is the structural gap that SPE identifies. Flexibility support schemes for non-fossil generation exist in the design of the EU electricity market, but Member States are allowed rather than obliged to create them.
Data from SolarPower Europe shows that in 2025, only 11 out of 27 Member States had active battery energy storage support programs, amounting to almost 70 GWh allocated through at least five different financing instruments: recovery and resilience plans, modernization funds, regional development funds and national innovation tenders. Sixteen Member States had no active scheme.
The largest volumes were allocated in Poland, which allocated 14.5 GWh through its Recovery and Resilience Plan, Bulgaria with 13.7 GWh through the Modernization Fund, and Italy with 10 GWh through its MACSE mechanism. Germany, despite being Europe’s largest economy, has allocated around 1 GWh through innovation tenders.
From 2024 to 2026, SolarPower Europe will do that repeated call For a much larger battery fleet, steady evidence of accelerated deployment of storage in the EU, and the European Commission’s AccelerateEU initiative, together point to a shift from simply locating the storage gap to treating flexibility as a central part of Europe’s energy security strategy.
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