"EU companies face electricity prices that are 2-3 times higher than those in the United States and in China." Mario Draghi said that in Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, presenting his report on European competitiveness. Nearly two years later, it remains one of the truest - and least acted-on - lines in the whole document.
That verdict is not ours alone. EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index (draghiwatch.eu), which tracks how many of the report's 383 recommendations have become binding EU law, finds energy the laggard among the report's major reform areas.
At the index's January 2026 interim audit, energy measures sat at 22.9% implementation, counting strict and partial together - the weakest of the sectors the index singles out as movers. Defence, by contrast, had leapt from 35.7% to 78.6% over the same window. Energy-intensive industries climbed from 40.5% to 57.1%. Energy itself barely moved.
The July 2026 preliminary update sharpened the picture. Across all 383 recommendations, strict implementation reached 15.7% - 60 recommendations - and strict-plus-partial 41.3%, or 158. When EPIC published its first ranking of the Commission's directorates-general, the energy directorate (DG ENER) landed near the bottom at 2.7% strict implementation, against 41.7% for the trade directorate at the top.
Energy's problem is the extreme version of a general one. The index rose 7.5 points in the September-to-January stretch, then just 2.4 points from February to June 2026. Delivery is decelerating. EPIC's reading is that the EU moves fastest where competitiveness fuses with security - defence, the 90-billion-euro Ukraine loan - and slowest on the structural reforms that force market outcomes, from the single market to capital markets to energy.
The market backdrop explains why the energy gap stings. Through 2025 and into 2026, EU industrial electricity prices have run at roughly twice US levels and around 50% above China's - close to the ratio Draghi flagged. His proposed remedies, from joint gas purchasing to deeper electricity-market integration and long-term power contracts, are exactly the kind of structural change the index shows moving slowest.
Energy was supposed to be the easy sell. High prices hurt every factory, every household, every argument for European industry - and Draghi handed Brussels a menu of fixes. That the file has barely moved says something uncomfortable about how the EU delivers: it acts fast when a threat wears a uniform and slowly when the reform means rewiring a market. EPIC's next major reading lands in September 2026, on the report's first anniversary. If energy is still stuck, the gap between what Draghi diagnosed and what Europe has done will be hardest to explain precisely where it matters most to the continent's competitiveness.
