Green technology Comeback of the command economy? Europe wants to steer production decisions

Brussels, Berlin It was a matter of overcoming a precarious dependency and strengthening Europe’s sovereignty, even then. The “Plan Calcul”, put into effect by French President Charles de Gaulle in 1966, was intended to help build a domestic computer industry and the dominance of US corporations such as IBM break. The initiative cost hundreds of millions of francs and was discontinued in 1974. The “Plan Calcul” was a failure.

Now the Europeans want to try again, with a plan whose ambitions put all previous industrial policy programs in the shade. It’s not just about computers, but about promising products of all kinds: microchips, batteries, heat pumps, wind turbines and solar cells.