Non-paper on Renewable Energy Directive by Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Spain for COREPER 13 April 2022 The war in Ukraine has shown Europe's vulnerability due to its dependency on energy imports. We agree that the acceleration of RES deployment in all sectors is key to reduce this dependency and contribute to achieving climate neutrality. For this reason, we need to strengthen our efforts to accelerate RES deployment in the context of the revised Renewable Energy Directive (RED). A lowering of ambition by removing sectoral targets or making them all indicative cannot be the right answer to the current geopolitical crisis and to challenges of the Green Deal. Instead, weakening the. structure of sectoral targets would put the achievement of the more ambitious EU 2030 target at risk. Consequently, we call for maintaining the mandatory nature of the sectoral targets (while keeping indicative targets indicative) and stick as much possible to the respective levels of ambition. Atthe same time, we are aware that an appropriate balance between reliability and flexibility must be found for a Council agreement on the revised RED. Therefore, some targeted adjustments might be needed on the newly proposed binding sectoral targets to provide more flexibility to agree on a general approach in the Council Furthermore, we oppose that low-carbon fuels are accounted as renewable energy either in the context of the sectoral targets or the overall EU target. This would not only undermine the structure and credibility of the revised RED, but also dilute the achievement of EU 2030 target. The revised RED must continue to exclusively focus on renewable energy. In general, we call for constructively working together on compromises that incentivise RES deployment in the relevant sectors and ensure sufficient flexibility, while preserving the ‘ambition and fundamental structure of the RED revision.