Regulatory challenges and opportunities for renewable energy transition in the EU: a comparative study of France and Germany

Abstract

Climate change presents an urgent challenge that demands ambitious and effective legal responses. Nations worldwide are enacting climate and energy laws to meet the goals of theParis Agreement and subsequent international commitments. In Europe, the EU’s new Climate Law has set a binding target of at least a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (from 1990 levels) and climate neutrality by 2050. France and Germany, as key EU Member States with significant emissions and influence, have each recently overhauled their climate and energy legislation. France adopted the “Climate and Resilience Law”5 (Loi n°2021-1104 du 22 août 2021), a comprehensive act intended to accelerate emissions cuts by 2030 and enhance the country’s resilience to climate impacts. This law was noteworthy for drawing many of its provisions from an unprecedented experiment in deliberative democracy, the Citizens’ Convention for Climate (Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat), in which 150 randomly selected citizens proposed measures to reduce France’s emissions. Germany, for its part, enacted the Renewable Energy Sources Act 2023 (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz, “EEG 2023”), as part of an “Easter Package” of laws passed in July 2022 to drastically scale up renewable energy deployment. The EEG 2023 aims to ensure renewables constitute 80% of gross electricity consumption by 2030, underscoring Germany’s ambition to reach climate neutrality by 2045. Both the French and German initiatives are central to their national strategies for meeting climate targets, yet they represent contrasting approaches: the French law emerged from a bottom-up participatory process, whereas the German EEG reflects a technical, targetdriven framework built on two decades of Energiewende (energy transition) policies.