Europe has a chance Monday to flex its independence from the United States by embracing the energy technology that President Donald Trump hates the most.

After a fortnight spent staring into the abyss of conflict with America, ministers from across the continent will meet in Hamburg to agree to massively boost the North Sea’s production of wind energy.

The Hamburg Declaration — to be signed by Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Norway — will pledge to build 100 gigawatts of joint offshore wind projects. That’s more than the current total electricity generation capacity of the U.K.

The summit has taken on new meaning since Trump’s attempts to coerce his NATO allies to hand over Greenland pushed the transatlantic alliance to — perhaps beyond —breaking point.

“Homegrown clean power,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen wrote in POLITICO on Monday, offers an alternative to the EU’s deepening reliance on imported liquefied natural gas, much of which now comes from the U.S.

“Relying so heavily on fossil fuels, whether they come from Russia or anywhere else, cannot give us the energy security and prosperity we need. It leaves us incredibly vulnerable to the volatility of international markets and pressure from external actors,” they said.

Harnessing the North Sea’s gusty winds requires political cooperation that bridges national differences, the Brexit divide and political backlash to the expansion of renewables. While the offshore industry in the U.K. has recently seen strong interest, countries such as Germany and France are struggling to get companies to bid for new projects.

And clean energy boosterism cannot mask the fact that gas, while slowly declining, is still almost one quarter of Europe’s energy supply and central to Europe’s heavy industry. Nor are all European countries and companies convinced there is any need to stop the boats pouring in from Texas.

Trump knows he has Europe over a barrel. Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he derided wind turbines and the Europeans that install them as “losers.”

His self-interest was barely veiled. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter of LNG and since the EU began shutting off Russian pipeline gas, the bloc’s imports from the U.S. have risen fourfold, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a non-profit climate group.

Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, boasted in Davos that U.S. exports had been able to “displace most all of the Russian gas” and foresaw “robust energy trade” going forward; trade that would be, “in the short run … dominated by exports from the United States into Europe.” He called for the EU to remove “barriers” to the new era of transatlantic gas exports, namechecking Europe’s carbon border tax and its corporate environmental regulations.

The U.S., he said, is “working with our colleagues here in Europe to remove those barriers.”

U.S. gas was celebrated by European officials as key part of their strategy for ditching Russian energy, a savior from across the seas — alongside, of course, the growing the use of renewables like wind and solar.

But the growing reliance has taken on an entirely new geopolitical significance under Trump.

“The big weakness was and is that fossil fuel supply was moving from one unreliable supply source (Russia) to a set of other potentially unreliable supply sources and that over-dependency on any one of them risked a repeat of previous problems,” said a European Commission official involved in the EU’s efforts to cut dependence on Russian gas, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

“I just didn’t think we’d have to worry about the U.S. — that was before Trump,” they added.

The North Sea summit was first set up in 2022 as an antidote to Russian energy dependence. Its third edition will be overshadowed by fears — voiced by energy analysts, if not necessarily by some European leaders still eager to appease Trump — that the U.S. could weaponize gas in the way Vladimir Putin did against the Europeans before and after his invasion of Ukraine.

This year several heads of state, energy ministers as well as the biggest industry players are expected to attend, the German hosts said. The goal is to strengthen the cooperation between neighboring states along the North Sea.

Three declarations are set to be signed, according to German government officials familiar with the matter. The heads of states will sign the Hamburg Declaration pledging close cooperation and united efforts to secure critical infrastructure.

The energy ministers will also sign their own declaration focusing on the necessary grid infrastructure for offshore wind parks including financing measures and accelerating planning measures.

And lastly there will be the Joint Offshore Wind Investment Pact for the North Sea, signed by the energy ministers and key industry players. Both sides are promising to do everything in their power to bring offshore wind back on track.

“This is a great opportunity to remind us why the transformation of the energy system matters,” Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s Executive Vice President told POLITICO after Trump’s attack on green energy in Davos. Renewable sources of energy “mean freedom, lower dependence and vulnerabilities.”

Can’t stop guzzling  

While pivoting to clean power is an obvious priority, “you cannot dream away the existing dependence on oil and gas imports,” said Thijs Van de Graaf, a specialist in the geopolitics of energy at the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies.

The Commission has limited power to dictate where companies obtain their LNG supplies, and the dizzying pace of growth in purchases of the U.S. product will be difficult to reverse.

“Unilateral action from the EU to limit its purchases is … unlikely,” argued Jack Reid, a lead economist at economic advisory firm Oxford Economics in a note published last week. He pointed out that for all the EU’s efforts to diversify, Russia remains the bloc’s second largest supplier of LNG.

On top of that, the importers themselves are hesitant to curb such a roaring trade. POLITICO asked several German companies and received a range of responses. Some foresaw no change in the U.S. trade, while others, including Uniper, said flexibility may be needed.

“This is not a relationship we are stepping back from, on the contrary, we are deepening cooperation with U.S. partners at pace,” said Alexandros Exarchou, the CEO of Atlantic See, a Greek LNG import venture that recently struck a 20-year deal with U.S. firm Venture Global to import half a million tons of LNG annually.

Others have more pressing energy challenges to address. For Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, reassessing the U.S. trade relationship is unthinkable as war with Russia rages on.

“We have no plans to reduce our engagement with U.S. suppliers,” James O’Brien, the head of trading at DTEK’s trading unit, D.Trading, told POLITICO. “In fact, we are actively seeking to expand our volumes to cover the critical supply gap in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe from 2026/27.”

The U.S. LNG market remains “the most liquid and flexible in the world,” he said, adding that for Ukraine, U.S. LNG “is not a risk, it is a lifeline.”

Many European officials “are still living that old liberal world,” said Van de Graaf, and expect a return to normalcy and stability in EU-U.S. trade. “That ideological position is no longer tenable in light of all of what is transpiring.”