Renewable Energy Directive rules for subsidising wood burning
28 janeiro 2026
Despite Member States’ slow transposition, the EU is already developing post-2030 rules
In late July 2025, the European Commission opened infringement procedures against all EU Member States except Denmark for their failure to transpose the third Renewable Energy Directive (RED III), adopted in 2023, into national law. Since then, only Ireland appears to have joined Denmark in notifying the Commission of full transposition. Failure to transpose the Directive concerns forests, as the Directive foresees additional, limited restrictions on Member States that subsidise energy companies for burning wood for energy.
Fern’s detailed analysis shows that Denmark’s transposition respected RED III’s main forest biomass elements, even going slightly beyond in some areas – although neither the RED III nor Denmark’s transposition are enough to reverse the excessive logging for bioenergy driven by EU and national incentives.
Transposition is ongoing in other countries, sometimes, such as in Germany, against a backdrop of bioenergy industry lobbying. Regulatory drafts in France and Spain risk breaching important RED III sustainability elements, while the Netherlands have already discontinued many public support schemes for energy production from woody biomass, and the transposition of the main RED III forest biomass elements has been completed.
In late 2025, the European Commission announced that it was planning, at the end of 2026, to issue a legislative proposal for a RED revision for the post-2030 period, as part of a broader revamp of its entire climate and energy package: expect relentless bioenergy industry lobbying in 2026.
In this era of legislative simplification, the RED’s biomass sustainability framework – with its complex, bureaucratic, costly and ineffective criteria – should rightly be a prime target, with woodburning excluded from renewable energy incentives. This will not only stop rewarding the burning of precious, scarce wood supplies, it will also ease logging pressures on forests and free-up wood resources for other industries. The bioenergy industry claims to contribute to Europe’s energy security, but the harm it causes (burning 50% of the EU wood harvest, draining public budgets and harming citizens’ health) is disproportionate to the energy generated (not even 10% of current EU demand). It is finally time for the EU’s simplification agenda to set its sight on stopping biomass subsidies, and the public savings that will result.
Image: Michele Ursi/Shutterstock
Categorias: News, Forest Watch, Bioenergy
