The Plenary of the European Parliament adopted on Tuesday with a large majority, 535 votes “for”, 63 “against” and 53 abstentions, the REPowerEU Plan for increasing energy independence, worth 20 billion euro, announced the PNL MEP Siegfried Mureşan.

“We initiated the REPowerEU Plan to come to the aid of people and businesses in Europe which are suffering because of the energy crisis and energy price increases. We want to make sure that in the future there will be no more risk of energy bills doubling, and people not knowing from one month to the next whether they will be able to pay their bills or not. To guarantee this, we need to diversify energy resources and get rid of all dependence on fossil fuels from the Russian Federation,” said MEP Siegfried Mureşan, co-rapporteur of the European Parliament on the European Recovery and Resilience Mechanism and the REPowerEU Plan, according to a press release quoted by News.ro.

The PNL MEP also said that REPowerEU will finance a new chapter of the national recovery and resilience plans of the European Union member countries, including Romania.

“This chapter will include reforms and investments through which we want to increase the energy security of our countries. Romania will receive from this new fund 1.4 billion euros for investments in energy efficiency, reducing dependence on gas imports from the Russian Federation, improving the energy infrastructure and investing in renewable energy sources. These non-refundable funds will be added to the approximately 30 billion euros that our country already receives for the National Recovery and Resilience Plan from the European Recovery and Resilience Mechanism,” Mureşan added.

The REPowerEU legislation adopted on Tuesday provides that all member states will receive a 20% pre-financing at the time of approval by the European Commission and the EU Council of the new RepowerEU pillars of the recovery plans.