July 24, 2025

  • The European Commission recommends that member states apply tax incentives to support the industry’s energy transition.

  • According to the Commission’s recommendation, tax incentives represent a significant opportunity to “accelerate the shift to zero-emission vehicles,” a key issue for decarbonizing all industrial processes.

  • We need a 360+1 vision: it’s not enough to decarbonize factory processes—we must also work to reduce emissions throughout the entire industrial supply chain.

Continuing our analysis of the EU Recommendation urging member states to develop tax incentives to support the Green Deal Industrial Plan, today’s article focuses on a crucial aspect of the energy transition: decarbonizing the supply chain—especially transport.

Last week’s article reviewed the fiscal tools proposed by the Commission to move from “the polluter pays” to “the non-polluter pays less,” aiming to make taxation a driver of investment rather than a barrier. Today, we turn our attention to one of the sectors that could benefit most from these tax incentives: transportation. For this sector, the Commission recognizes that fiscal measures represent “a significant opportunity to accelerate the shift to zero-emission vehicles,” particularly regarding corporate fleets.

However, from an industrial perspective, when we talk about “fleets,” we should think beyond executive cars and recognize the critical role of all transport within industrial activity. As we noted in our article Don’t Let the Electron Walk Alone – FIE, transforming transportation associated with industry is not just an environmental challenge—it’s an urgent necessity to achieve climate neutrality while remaining competitive.

The Factory Is Not an Island

The factory is not an island. It is just one element of the broader industrial process, whose activity is inherently tied to mobility and transport. Unless we have the tools to decarbonize this entire process, we won’t have truly decarbonized industry. To put it simply: the screws used in a final product like a washing machine didn’t just consume energy and emit CO₂ at the facility where they were manufactured—they likely traveled via several modes of transportation that also emitted CO₂: the truck that took them to the port, the ship that transported them, the van that picked them up for a logistics center, and the small vehicle that finally delivered them to the washing machine factory. That little screw has probably spent a significant part of its life traveling the world!

Therefore, we need a broad view of the industrial process—one that doesn’t overlook the supply chain. As Albert Concepción, director of FIE, emphasizes: “We must align ourselves with what we at FIE call the 360+1 approach: it’s not enough to implement measures that decarbonize what happens inside our production facility—we must also contribute to decarbonizing the ‘+1’, everything that happens outside our walls but is directly related to our industrial activity. The clearest example of that is transportation and mobility.”