The Iran conflict has been burning for two and a half months. European households and factories are still paying for it in their energy bills. What exactly should governments do about it? As of 13 May, they have a 27-country reference guide.
According to a new publication by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Energy, Brussels published the AccelerateEU catalogue of national best practices on 13 May at the Informal Energy Council in Nicosia, Cyprus. Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen presented it directly to EU Energy Ministers — a signal that Brussels is not only coordinating analysis but pressing capitals for action.
The catalogue is explicitly designed as a living document: a web-based, updatable compilation of measures that member states are already deploying successfully. The premise is peer learning at scale. Rather than waiting for new legislation, the Commission is pointing to what works in one country and asking the other 26 to take a look.
The catalogue organises measures into three priority areas. First: protecting consumers and industry in the short term while keeping the longer-term clean energy transition on track. Second: driving immediate energy savings and fast-tracking clean alternatives, including scaling up European manufacturing capacity for clean-energy equipment. Third: mobilising investment in efficiency, clean energy production, and demand flexibility.
What unites all three is the same logic: the fastest route to lower bills in the current crisis is consuming less fossil fuel, and the fastest route to durable resilience is breaking the underlying dependency on imported oil and gas.
The Commission attaches concrete targets to the exercise. If EU countries fully implemented existing energy legislation — not new rules, just the ones already on the books — the bloc could cut natural gas demand by 10 to 15 billion cubic metres per year and reduce oil use by 15 to 20 million tonnes of oil equivalent annually, according to the EC's own assessment.
To put those numbers in context: 10–15 BCM is roughly the annual gas consumption of Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Fifteen to twenty Mtoe of oil savings is equivalent to hundreds of millions of barrels per year removed from European import demand. These are not marginal reductions.
The catalogue follows the broader AccelerateEU communication the Commission put forward on 22 April 2026. That was the policy framework; this catalogue is its operational arm — the actual toolbox handed to governments.
The release of the AccelerateEU catalogue is a quiet but telling moment. Brussels is acknowledging that the problem is not a lack of legal tools: Europe already has the rules. The bottleneck is implementation speed — enforcement, political will, and the capacity to adapt national policy across 27 very different energy systems, each with its own grid, industrial base, and political constraints.
The real test is not what gets published in a catalogue but what gets adopted in national capitals — through ministerial decisions, grid investments, consumer incentive schemes, and regulatory enforcement. The Nicosia meeting may be the opening push. Whether it translates into action before the next winter gas-storage season is the only question that matters.
"This must be a wake-up call and a turning point," Commissioner Dan Jørgensen said. Europe has the handbook. Now it is waiting on the will to follow it.
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