To ensure compliance with ambitious European Union energy and climate targets, countries must periodically submit National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) to the European Commission. These plans outline how each country intends to achieve the 2030 decarbonisation targets for renewables and energy efficiency.
The first round of NECPs were submitted in 2019 and a second round in 2023/2024. Thus, plans now exist for all countries at two different periods in time. This is a remarkable source of information for those interested in European energy policy, comparable across both countries and time.
However, analysis of NECPs is limited by the length the documents, which each run into hundreds of pages (Ember has published a comprehensive tracker of electricity sector impacts while the Commission is required to perform an assessment – but this is understandably tailored toward EU-level general insights).
Ongoing and rapid advances in natural language processing should ease the burden of analysing the documents by enabling the development of tools to highlight progressively deeper insights. We conducted a simple relative frequency analysis for a series of words mentioned in the NECPs to indicate whether interesting insights lie within.