SME2B Business Forum Europe 2023:

New Energy for SMEs and Mid-Caps

For an SME- and Mid-caps-friendly European Green Transition Policy, Geostrategic, Innovation and Business dialogues for viable ways forward

Brussels, 28th June 2023

Sparks Meeting, Rue Ravenstein 60, 1000 Brussels

Draft programme

In December 2019, the new European Commission had proposed its strategic vision of the European Green Deal, followed in 2020 and 2021 by the adoption of significant law acts in many fields, accompanied by other legal initiatives like Taxonomy, Corporate Sustainability Reporting (CSR) and Due Diligence in Global Supply Chains.

This took place while a global pandemic – that until the first half of 2022 – caused enormous economic costs, rising inflation and strong market imbalances. The same European Commission seemed to sense these difficulties when it forecasted in a draft Communication of 18 Feb. 2022, 6 days before the Russian invasion in Ukraine, “high and volatile energy prices until at least end of 2023”. And when Russia then really invaded Ukraine, energy prices skyrocketed to levels 10+ times higher than in 2021.    

The 2022 energy price explosion was of course due to market speculations that the necessary EU-sanctions had triggered, but it was probably also fuelled by the artificial price push that the EU’s reform of the CO2 Emission Trading System has caused in 2021. To this have to be added the energy market’s “Merit-Order System” – whose reform was and is more than overdue – some systemic inefficiencies, infrastructural barriers, high national taxes on energy, as well as inadequate national energy policies, like Germany that decided to shut down its nuclear and coal power plants contemporarily, building on energy supplies without any alternative to gas, or France that focuses too few on renewables.

The current situation at the beginning of 2023, with energy prices tripled, inflation at 10-12%, supply chains still in disorder and a series of policies highly likely to add more costs to business operation, this enormous pressure on SMEs requires to urgently reflect on how our energy and climate policies can be re-tuned and adapted in the coming years, in order to avoid the heavy loss of competitiveness of hundreds of thousands of European SMEs and Mid-Caps, and with them the loss of millions of jobs.

The SME2B Business Forum Europe 2023 “New Energy for SMEs and Mid-Caps” organised by European Entrepreneurs CEA-PME and AMAZON on June 28th 2023 intends to facilitate dialogues about which political options, geostrategic priorities and technological solutions can help to achieve an SME- and Mid-Caps-friendly European Energy and Climate Policy, and how we can accelerate fruitful business cooperation in the related fields across European borders, for a more competitive European economy.

Please register here: https://sme2b.european-entrepreneurs.org