EU plans to supercharge the clean energy transition and wean the bloc off Russian gas and oil have stalled — and not enough investments are being made in vital projects, a shock new report has warned.

It is also unclear how much Russian oil has dodged sanctions and made its way into the European market, according to a European Court of Auditors (ECA) report published on September 9.

The ECA’s intervention came just seven months after auditors slammed EU chiefs over supplies of metals and minerals critical to battery manufacturing and other sectors, saying moves to diversify supply chains had yet to show tangible results.

Now, the ECA has targeted the REPowerEU plan — launched in 2022 to secure energy independence from Russian oil and gas imports in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

The plan has effectively stalled because it does not provide for effective governance to monitor the implementation and progress of projects, the auditors said.

Battery storage

Under REPowerEU, battery storage is designated as a core enabler of Europe’s clean‑energy transition, with around 55GW installed and 30GW more in the pipeline as of April 2026.

According to the auditors the plan “is struggling to deliver”, just as Europe’s energy security is facing renewed threats from the turmoil in the Middle East.

And while EU sanctions have led to a drastic fall in imports of oil from Russia, the auditors said it is unclear how much has been imported via third countries or through ‘shadow fleet’ tankers.

Gas imports have also fallen, but some EU countries imported more Russian gas in 2024 than before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the auditors said.

The drop in Russian energy imports can also be attributed to other factors, such as a series of mild winters and lower consumption due to high energy prices. This means that the REPowerEU plan’s direct impact might be more modest than it first appears.

Ambitious goals

The plan included accelerated permitting rules for all energy storage projects, including standalone and co-located renewable energy facilities.

But without a major boost, the auditors have warned REPowerEU will be unable to reach its ambitious goals.

The plan has had little resonance so far across national policies, as the 27 EU member states have committed not even a fifth of the €300 billion ($348 billion) in additional investments needed to meet its objectives, the auditors said.

The European Commission had estimated that some €300 billion in additional investments would be required by 2030 — and made this amount available from the Covid pandemic ‘recovery cash pot’, the recovery and resilience facility (RRF).

Member states could add dedicated REPowerEU operations to their recovery plans for delivering the plan’s objectives, but auditors said the governance framework lacks effective tools to steer the implementation of the plan and reliably track results.

‘Huge gap’

Individual EU nations’ national energy and climate plans were meant to steer REPowerEU but in reality most did not include any specific actions or targets to bolster the plan’s objectives.

“In addition, EU countries committed only €54.3 billion out of the €300 billion made available under the RRF for REPowerEU. For the auditors, such a huge gap indicates either that investment needs were wrongly estimated and largely overblown, or that there is an inability to translate objectives into concrete action.”

While the plan has helped to speed up some key projects in member states, it has done little to accelerate the clean energy transition by increasing renewable production capacity.

Based on the targets included in the dedicated RRF chapters, the auditors found that the additional renewables production capacity created is negligible and very far from the 103GW objective.

The same observation applies to grid interconnectivity. The EU auditors identified only three REPowerEU measures across two member states for this target, and one was eventually dropped.

ECA member Mihails Kozlovs, who spearheaded the report, said: “Four years after its launch, REPowerEU has stalled, even though several hundred billion euros have been made available.

Highly critical

“We must learn the right lessons now, as the new geopolitical tensions and their impact on energy markets underscore the need to accelerate diversification and prevent future over-reliance on a single supplier.”

The auditors’ findings are the latest in a string of recent reports that have been highly critical of the EU.

Last March, plans for the rollout of much needed energy storage capacity across Europe were criticised as uneven, fragmented and hindering investment in a study by the EU’s Joint Research Centre.

Last month, the block was accused of sidelining sustainability principles in the race to secure materials vital to the battery industry. A study published on August 13, by Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, said security of supply was now taking precedence over sufficiency in raw materials policy.

Also in August, analysis from Deloitte claimed Europe’s auto industry could see up to €10.5 billion ($12 billion) in profits diverted to Asia by the end of the decade because of a chronic dependency on sourcing EV battery cells from the the region.

Europe’s battery industry is now at a crossroads — and buying cheap battery cells from Asia is not a long-term solution for sovereign European battery production, the report warned.