However, diplomats said Germany was insisting on a binding target to underpin the EU's drive for world leadership in the fight against climate change and had maintained that objective in a draft communique for the March 8-9 EU summit.

"We are not in favour of fixing binding targets in renewable energy," said the French official after EU ambassadors argued over the draft statement on Wednesday.

"It is up to each member state, in all flexibility and subsidiarity, to set its own objective. Our position has not changed," he said. Subsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be taken at the lowest effective level of government.

Significantly, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will chair the meeting under Germany's EU presidency, omitted any mention of a mandatory target for renewables in a speech to parliament in Berlin previewing the summit.

British officials signalled on Wednesday that Prime Minister Tony Blair had dropped Britain's resistance to a binding target after Merkel and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso convinced him it would give the EU's green leadership greater credibility.

Some EU diplomats said they expect French President Jacques Chirac to yield at the summit in exchange for some recognition that France's nuclear power programme helps cut carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

But about 10 other countries, including several ex-communist central European new member states racing to catch up economically with the wealthy west, are also against accepting a binding renewables target.

One possible compromise, diplomats said, might be to make the 20 percent target binding on the EU as a whole but not on individual member states, leaving burden-sharing to be negotiated later.