Competitive regions in a competitive Europe

FEDARENE publishes its position paper Competitive regions in a competitive Europe, the result of a process led by the Working Group on Decarbonisation for Competitiveness.

In March and April 2026, the Working Group ran its first Best Practice Collection Campaign, collecting 13 practices from member agencies in seven countries: Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, Poland and Austria. The practices and the discussions within the Working Group led to the identification of four gaps that hold investment back:

• Delivery: reaching every business. Europe counts around 34 million SMEs, and most lack the expertise and time to identify measures, select technologies and navigate funding. Companies need a trusted point of contact close to where they operate, as shown in Catalonia, where 43 offices run by business associations led to 515 energy efficiency projects in their first year.
• Funding: turning finance into investment. Upfront costs, complex procedures and uncertainty over future rules delay or stop investment. Where schemes are well designed, public money multiplies: in the Basque Country, 17,6 million EUR of public funding induced 85,6 million EUR of private investment. In Occitanie, third-party financing allowed a regional agency to finance 1,7 million EUR of measures for an aeronautics subcontractor with no upfront cost.
• Planning: anticipating demand and permitting where they are decided. Reaching the EU’s 46% electrification target by 2040 will add demand in every territory on grids that are already constrained, and for 60% of companies, permitting takes between one and six years. Industrial parks show what coordinated planning can achieve, as in Manresa, where 36 companies created Spain’s first industrial renewable energy community.
• Governance: building the transition with the level that implements it. Companies commit when they see the transition as a project for their own business and territory. In Upper Austria, industrial emissions have fallen by 11% since 2005 while the regional economy grew by 29%, supported by a cluster of more than 250 companies.

For each gap, the paper presents the solutions that Regions and their Energy Agencies have already developed on the ground, illustrated by practices from the campaign, and recommends the measures that would increase their impact across the Union. The practices are presented in full in the annex.