European Commissioner Dan JØRGENSEN in Zagreb, Croatia for the Conference "Affordable Europe – Energy and housing for a better life"
5 November 2026
Contents updated on 5 Nov 2026
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European Commission
Follow its sittings00:32 - 03:04
Speaker 1
Thank you. So, the cost of living, the lack of affordability for normal people in our Union is a very big concern. In all member states, people are struggling to pay the bills. And if you look at what are the two biggest bills on the kitchen table for a normal family, it's one: the bill for housing, whether it's rent or mortgage, two: the bill for energy.
So thank you so much for organizing this event. Thank you to the ministers for being here and giving an insight into the plans that you are implementing. It's very impressive and you're doing a lot of very good things to alleviate the problems and the challenges. I look forward to hearing more about it in the coming days. Let me try and give you an overview of the different actions that we are working on from the European perspective.
Let's start with energy. So, energy in Europe faces three big challenges. One, prices. We pay too much for our energy. Even in a normal year, 47 million people, in average, in Europe say that they cannot adequately heat their homes.
Imagine that, if you choose to freeze, it's because you've already taken a lot of other very difficult choices before you get to that. That's one of the last things you choose, do you want to starve or do you want to freeze. And this happens to 47 million people every year in an average year. Now this year, unfortunately, is not going to be an average year, because the prices are even higher than they normally are. The situation in the Middle East has led to us paying more than 120 billion euros more for our energy this year than what we normally do, without receiving one extra molecule, just for the same energy, we pay 120 billion more.
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