From Paris to practice: an investment-oriented framework for EU sustainability and energy storage

The year 2025 marks a critical juncture in global sustainability governance, coinciding with the tenth anniversaries of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. Yet, progress remains uneven. Financing gaps, fragmented governance, and weak legal integration between climate and development commitments continue to constrain decarbonization. Energy storage, essential for stabilizing renewable-based power systems, exemplifies this challenge. Despite its recognized role in achieving Paris goals and advancing multiple SDG targets, storage deployment and financing remain ungoverned by binding international or European Union targets, reflecting a gap in the combined mosaic of internal and external commitments. This study extends an original integrative framework—first developed at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment for the electric utilities sector—to renewable energy storage in the EU. The methodology combines doctrinal legal analysis, sustainability science, and the policy coherence literature to evaluate how storage investment and regulation align with broader climate and development objectives. Particular attention is given to financial flows, subsidy reform, and enforceability in light of recent developments such as the Draghi Report on EU investment needs and the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on climate finance obligations. Findings indicate that while storage has the potential to act as a systemic enabler of policy coherence for sustainable development, incoherence persists where investments, regulation, and justice considerations remain fragmented. Embedding storage policy coherence in binding EU legislative instruments would transform storage into both a lever and a leverage point for aligning the Paris Agreement and the SDGs, moving coherence from discourse to enforceable practice.