How the EU boosts renewable energy integration: targets and the grid

Eighteen months. That is how long member states were given to turn the amended Renewable Energy Directive into national law after it entered into force on 20 November 2023, with a much shorter deadline, 1 July 2024, for the parts that deal with permits. The permit clauses were fast-tracked for a plain reason: Brussels had concluded that the bottleneck for wind and solar in Europe was no longer the price of panels or turbines, but paperwork and wires.

The directive, formally (EU) 2023/2413 and usually called RED III, is the centre of the EU’s approach. It is worth reading alongside two less famous instruments, the interconnection target and the grid action plan, because a renewable share on paper means little if the power cannot move from where it is generated to where it is used.

The binding number: 42.5 % by 2030

RED III requires that at least 42.5 % of the EU’s gross final energy consumption comes from renewable sources by 2030, with an aspiration of 45 %. The previous directive, from 2018, had set 32 %. The European Commission’s page on the Renewable Energy Directive targets and rules sets out the history: 20 % for 2020 under the first directive of 2009, 32 % under the second, 42.5 % now.

The starting point is lower than the headline suggests. Eurostat put the renewable share of EU energy consumption at 25.2 % in 2024 and, in its provisional figures for 2025, at 26.2 %. That leaves 16.3 points to find in five years, a little over 3 points a year. 2025 added one. At that rate the target will be missed, and the honest question is by how much.

The target covers all energy, not only electricity. That matters, because electricity is the easy part. Heat, industrial processes and transport are where the stubborn fossil demand sits, and the directive has separate clauses for each.

Sector targets that lean on the grid

For transport, member states choose between two routes: a 29 % renewable share in transport energy by 2030, or a 14.5 % cut in the greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuels. The Irish Climate Change Advisory Council’s factsheet on RED III gives a clear summary of both options and of the heating rules, which require renewables in heating and cooling to rise by at least 0.8 percentage points a year on average over 2021–2025 and 1.1 points a year over 2026–2030.

Industry gets an indicative increase of 1.6 percentage points a year. The sharper clause is about hydrogen. According to the Commission, at least 42 % of the hydrogen used in industry must be renewable fuel of non-biological origin by 2030, rising to 60 % in 2035. In transport, such fuels should make up at least 1 % of the energy supplied by 2030.

Renewable hydrogen is made by electrolysis powered by renewable electricity, so every one of these targets ends up as extra load on the power system. An electrolyser plant near a North Sea port is, from the grid’s point of view, a very large and fairly flexible customer. Where it is built decides which lines have to be reinforced.

Permits on a clock

The permit rules are the most practical part of RED III. Member states had to map the land and sea areas they need for their 2030 contribution, and then designate renewables acceleration areas where the environmental groundwork is done once, for the whole zone. Inside those areas a permit procedure may not exceed 12 months, or two years for offshore projects. Outside them the ceilings are two years onshore and three years offshore.

The factsheet lists how national governments have gone about it. Germany aims to set aside 2 % of its land for onshore wind by 2032. Portugal identified acceleration areas covering 12 % of its territory. Denmark screened the whole country for wind, solar and Power-to-X sites.

Faster permits for generation create a second problem. A wind farm approved in twelve months can wait far longer for a connection, and the Commission’s page on European grids reports grid connection queues in at least 16 member states. If you follow one project through the system, the connection date is usually the date to watch.

The wires: interconnection and the grid plans

Alongside the renewables target, the EU has an electricity interconnection target: each country should be able to import at least 15 % of its installed production capacity from its neighbours by 2030, up from 10 % by 2020. Cross-border capacity lets a sunny afternoon in Spain or a windy night in Denmark serve demand elsewhere, and it lets a country with a shortfall lean on the others. The site’s directory of Europe’s interconnectors lists the links that make up that capacity today, many of them HVDC cables laid on the seabed.

The grid itself is old and long. The Commission describes a network of more than 11 million kilometres, with 40 % of distribution grids over 40 years old. Its Grid Action Plan of November 2023 put the investment needed by 2030 at €584 billion. On 10 December 2025 it followed with the European Grids Package, which named eight cross-border bottlenecks as priority “energy highways”. Four are electricity projects covered on this site: the Pyrenean crossings between Spain and France (including the planned Bay of Biscay cable), the Great Sea Interconnector to Cyprus, Harmony Link between Poland and Lithuania, and the Bornholm Energy Island.

Offshore wind shows the scale. The Commission’s 2020 offshore strategy aimed for at least 60 GW by 2030 and 300 GW by 2050. In December 2024 the member states agreed regional goals that add up to 86–89 GW for 2030 and 355–366 GW for 2050, against 19.38 GW installed in 2023. Almost all of that capacity will reach shore through HVDC export cables, and some of it through shared hubs of the kind described in the guide to energy islands.

What still limits it

Three things stand between the targets and a working system. The first is transposition: when the July 2024 permit deadline passed, the Commission sent formal notices to 26 member states that had not completed it. The second is congestion inside countries, where power stalls on the way from coast to city and has to be curtailed or redispatched, a problem explained in the site’s guide to grid congestion. The third is time: an HVDC link of several hundred kilometres often takes the better part of a decade from first study to operation, which means that most of the lines that will carry power in 2030 either exist already or are under construction now.

The Grids Package proposals still have to pass the European Parliament and the Council. Their progress through 2026 and 2027 will decide whether the permit clock of RED III ever applies to the wires as strictly as it now applies to the turbines.