9 July 2026 – EUROFER is calling for an EU-wide industrial electricity price of EUR 50 per MWh. The goal is understandable. The path to get there is an invitation to the next multi-billion-euro subsidy at the expense of SMEs and taxpayers. Brussels’ regulatory machine out of control: impact assessments fail at the Commission’s Regulatory Scrutiny Board.
Brussels’ Regulatory Machine Out of Control
A current written question in the European Parliament asks the Commission uncomfortable questions, based on the Regulatory Scrutiny Board’s Annual Report 2025: does the Commission really believe that mass regulation enriches companies, families, and workers? Is it aware that its overregulation redistributes income from the real economy to the compliance industry?
The figures from the report support the question: in 2025, the Commission adopted 116 legislative proposals and 741 delegated acts, yet only 38 were subject to an impact assessment.
Impact Assessments: 56% received a negative opinion
The Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission’s own independent quality-control body, did not issue a single positive first opinion among 25 reports reviewed. 56% received a negative opinion, while the average quality is described as “weak” or “unsatisfactory.” The weakest elements: problem definition, option design, and impact analysis.
The EU steel regulation is symptomatic of this. It entered into force on 1 July 2026 without a full impact assessment. The legally required SME test is also completely missing, even though the steel sector is shaped precisely by small and medium-sized processors.
The written question hits the mark: Brussels regulates as if laws were free. For the real economy, they are not.
EUR 50 Electricity Price: EUROFER’s Subsidy Demand in the Fact Check
EUROFER is calling for an EU-wide industrial electricity price of EUR 50 per MWh. The goal is understandable. The path to get there is an invitation to the next multi-billion-euro subsidy at the expense of SMEs and taxpayers.
The Demand
The European steel association EUROFER argues that Europe’s steel industry suffers from electricity and gas prices that are two to three times higher than in the United States, China, or the MENA countries. European wholesale electricity prices are said to remain permanently above EUR 85 per MWh, while historical levels were closer to EUR 45. EUROFER is therefore calling for an EU-wide target of EUR 50 per MWh for industry’s total energy costs, including grid fees, indirect ETS costs, and security-of-supply premiums.
In principle, lower energy prices would be good. For everyone. The decisive question is how this goal is achieved, and who pays for it.
What EUR 50 Would Really Cost
The fiscal reality is sobering. EUROFER itself puts the steel industry’s electricity demand by 2030 at around 165 TWh. If only this volume were subsidized for a price gap of EUR 35 between the current market level and the target price, that would already amount to around EUR 5.8 billion per year, for the steel sector alone, excluding grid fees, hydrogen, or flexibility costs. At EUR 125 instead of EUR 50 per MWh, the figure would be around EUR 12.4 billion per year.
This is not an energy-price target. It is a subsidy program for a handful of large producers, financed from tax revenue or ETS income that actually belongs to the general public.
Green Steel: Promises Cancelled, Subsidies Still Collected
What EUROFER members are actually doing in parallel to these demands is particularly revealing. ArcelorMittal has cancelled or indefinitely postponed several green-steel projects in Europe. Salzgitter postponed expansion stages 2 and 3 of SALCOS by around three years in September 2025, despite already pledged public funding of around EUR 1 billion.
The justification is always the same: energy costs are too high, the hydrogen ramp-up is too slow, and regulatory uncertainty is too great. What remains unmentioned: the same corporations that are postponing their decarbonization projects are using the time gained to benefit for as long as possible from free EU ETS allocation, meaning from precisely those 700 million surplus certificates that the sector has accumulated since 2005 in addition to its actual CO2 emissions.
The pattern is clear: investment promises as political leverage, projects postponed when things become inconvenient, and at the same time pressure for an extension of free allocation. EUROFER’s energy-price demand fits seamlessly into this pattern.
What EUROFER Deliberately Conceals
Integrated blast furnace plants, the BF-BOF route, obtain a substantial share of their energy from process-related by-product gases: coke oven gas, blast furnace gas, and converter gas. These are used in their own power plants and make this route significantly less dependent on the external electricity market than EUROFER suggests. Electricity-price pressure mainly affects electric arc furnaces and future DRI-EAF technology.
EUROFER is therefore deliberately mixing the current cost structure of conventional blast furnaces with the future cost logic of an electrified steel industry, and deriving from this a subsidy demand that benefits outdated routes today and is supposed to finance the right ones tomorrow.
The Real Problem
Low energy prices for all market participants are achievable, but not through special tariffs for large corporations, not through cross-subsidization from ETS revenues, and not at the expense of SMEs that pay the same grid fees and electricity costs without compensation mechanisms, without lobbying power, and without special treatment.
Anyone who wants EUR 50 per MWh for the steel industry must structurally reform the electricity market: less dependence on gas, more grid capacity, and consistent expansion of sustainable and ideology-free energy generation, including the development of modern and safe nuclear reactors.
Everything else is redistribution from bottom to top, paid for by SMEs and taxpayers.
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