"EU companies face electricity prices that are 2-3 times higher than those in the United States and in China," Mario Draghi told the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, presenting his report on European competitiveness. Two years later, EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index (draghiwatch.eu), which tracks how many of the report's 383 recommendations have become binding EU law, gives the chapter on energy-intensive industries one of the best scores on the board. The price gap he described has not moved. Both facts are true, and the distance between them is the story.
EPIC, the European Policy Innovation Council, launched the index in September 2025 and audits it roughly every six months. In the September 2025 baseline, energy-intensive industries stood at 40.5% implemented or partially implemented. In the January 2026 interim audit the figure was 57.1%, a gain of 16.6 points in four months. Only defence moved faster, from 35.7% to 78.6%.
Set that against the rest of the scoreboard. Energy, the chapter that deals with the price of power itself, scored 22.9% in the same January audit, the laggard among sectors that moved at all. Pharmaceuticals and space were flat at about 27.8%. In the July 2026 preliminary update the index as a whole reached 15.7% strictly implemented (60 of 383) and 41.3% strict-plus-partial (158 of 383), and for the first time EPIC ranked the Commission's directorates-general by delivery: DG TRADE top at 41.7%, DG ENER at 2.7%, DG EMPL at zero. The July update also recorded a slowdown, with the February-to-June half-year adding 2.4 points against 7.5 in the previous one.
So heavy industry's chapter moved fast while the energy chapter stalled, and the directorate responsible for energy sits near the bottom of the ranking. Those are not contradictory results. They are the same result seen from two sides.
The recommendations that were ticked off in the energy-intensive chapter share a feature. They are instruments the Commission holds in its own hands, and they compensate industry for high prices rather than lowering them.
The carbon border adjustment mechanism entered its definitive phase on 1 January 2026, an eight-year phase-in to 2034 in which importers buy certificates for embedded carbon while free ETS allowances are withdrawn. That is trade policy, run from Brussels. The Clean Industrial Deal state-aid framework, adopted in June 2025, lets governments partly compensate energy-intensive users for indirect ETS costs passed through in electricity prices; the second Clean Industrial Deal implementation package of 16 December 2025 extended the ETS state-aid guidelines to further sectors at risk of carbon leakage. That is competition policy, also run from Brussels. The Industrial Accelerator Act proposed in March 2026, with its "made in Europe" procurement preferences and a 20% manufacturing target for 2035, is the same kind of tool.
None of these touches the thing Draghi measured. The 2-3x gap is made of wholesale gas dependence, network charges, national taxes and levies, and the absence of a single European electricity market that could move cheap power to where industry is. Those sit with member states and with DG ENER, which the index scores at 2.7%.
The live numbers do not flatter the scoreboard. European gas prices are at their highest since 2022 because of the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. The European Central Bank raised interest rates on 10 September and said inflation would stay "well above" its 2% target "for a prolonged period", with energy the reason. Gas storage is at a record seasonal low. A steelmaker or chemicals producer reading the index would find that Europe has delivered protection at the border and permission for its government to write a cheque, and has not delivered a cheaper kilowatt-hour.
There is a defence of the 57.1%, and it should be stated. Industry asked for exactly these measures. Compensation and border protection are what keep a plant open while the structural fix is built, and a plant that closes does not benefit from a single market completed in 2032. The index also measures what it says it measures: adopted binding law against a named list of recommendations. It does not claim to score outcomes, and a chapter can be well implemented and still describe a problem that has got worse for reasons no regulation controls, such as a war in the Gulf. Some of the price gap is structural. Europe has no shale, and no amount of legislation changes its geology.
But the report's own logic cuts the other way. Draghi did not recommend compensating industry for expensive power as an end state. He recommended it as a bridge, with the far bank being cheaper power through grids, market integration and a common approach to gas purchasing. The index says the bridge is built and the far bank is not.
EPIC's next full review of the Draghi Index is due this month, one year after launch. If the pattern of the first two audits holds, the sectors that keep moving will be the ones where the Commission can act alone, and the sector at the centre of Draghi's diagnosis will keep scoring in the twenties. The lesson of the energy-intensive chapter is that delivery follows competence, not urgency. Europe has fixed the parts of the problem it was allowed to fix. The part that would actually close the gap with the United States and China was never in Brussels' gift, and the index is honest enough to show it.
