TTC Extends Mutual Recognition to Animal Meds, Agrees on Heavy Duty Vehicle Charging Standards

Top European and U.S. officials have talked about the need for their EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council to produce concrete outcomes, and two were achieved in Sweden, at the fourth meeting -- standard conformity on how to charge electric heavy duty vehicles.

European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, one of the five leaders who chaired the meetings in Sweden that ended May 31, said at the concluding press conference that stakeholders are asking the governments for relevant work in the TTC, and she said this common standard is "very tangible."

Another tangible agreement was extending mutual recognition for pharmaceutical goods to veterinary medicines.

In the TTC joint statement, the two sides said the megawatt charging system will help roll out charging infrastructure for heavy duty trucks, and they are still working on plug compatibility and a common vehicle-to-grid communication interface for passenger vehicles and heavy-duty vehicles.

"We will continue to work together to develop a transatlantic test procedure for high power-charging, up to MCS levels, assuring interoperability and system charge performance. These efforts will ensure that stakeholders will benefit from fully compatible technical specifications, reducing manufacturing and deployment costs and thus facilitating transatlantic cooperation for electromobility to become mainstream," the statement said. "This cooperation also paves the way for possible MCS applications in inland shipping, marine, mining, and aviation sectors among others."

They are still working on creating a joint standards strategy for passenger EV charging, and said they share the goal of implementing "cost-effective smart charging infrastructure that avoids stranded assets."

The top trade official at the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, noted at the press conference that the two sides agreed on a work program for the Transatlantic Initiative on Sustainable Trade, an EU proposal aimed at increasing trade and lowering barriers in trade of green goods.

That work program begins with identifying sectors that could be boosted by trade cooperation, and working on regulatory approaches to green goods and technologies, "focusing on products, technologies, and smart protocols where stakeholders have identified a need but for which no standards exist." It also seeks conformity assessment cooperation.

The EU and U.S. will launch an initiative to assess green goods' supply chains -- and their risk of disruption -- starting with solar panels. Some of the disruption in solar panel imports in the U.S. has been due to the presence or suspected presence of raw materials from Xinjiang, which cannot be imported, due to the prohibition on importing goods made with forced labor.

They said they would work together on supply chain transparency and due diligence "to help ensure sustainable and responsible business practices."

The TIST will build on the work to measure embedded emissions that is part of the Global Sustainable Arrangement for Steel and Aluminum. The joint statement said again the two sides want to conclude those negotiations by October.

They said they will intensify their "efforts to diversify the EU and US supply of rare earth magnets as a way to avoid reliance on geographically concentrated primary production and processing."

In the area of diversifying supply chains, the joint statement also noted the EU and U.S. are negotiating "a critical minerals agreement for the purpose of enabling relevant critical minerals extracted or processed in the European Union to count toward requirements for clean vehicles in the Section 30D clean vehicle tax credit of the Inflation Reduction Act as well as part of a broader process by the United States and the European Union to collaborate on securing supplies of critical minerals."

At the press conference, a reporter asked the leaders if the U.S. and the EU have different views of trade with China. The joint statement said they have the same concerns about "a range of non-market policies and practices of third countries. We stand ready to address these practices, both bilaterally and through multilateral approaches. We have exchanged views and information regarding these types of policies and practices in the medical devices sector in China and their adverse impact on our workers and businesses, and we are exploring possible coordinated actions."

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the reporter, "We have remarkable convergence, actually ... including dealing with some of the challenges posed by China."

The joint statement said: "The European Union and the United States also share concerns about the impact of non-market economic policies on the global supply of semiconductors, particularly in legacy chips. To avoid negative spillover effects from excess global capacity that undermine the health of our respective semiconductor ecosystems, the European Union and the United States, in cooperation with like-minded partners, will exchange information and market intelligence related to non-market policies and practices and explore cooperative measures to address those policies and their distortionary effects."