Prénom de l'expert

Jacques

Nom de l'expert

LESOURNE

RWE, EON, EDF, ENGIE and other large utilities are in financial turmoil. This situation, which would have been unlikely twenty years ago, is related to several failures in governance within the EU as well as to global evolutions. This Edito Energie analyses the situation of large European electricity producers in light of the European energy policy. 

The European Commission has just made public a green paper devoted to its energy and climate policies until 2030.

Until the late 1990s, the balance of Chinese energy production and consumption was treated by the rest of the world as a net figure. No one knew what was going on inside the Chinese economy - it was a black box. As far as anyone was concerned, the Chinese would not soon be a major factor in world energy markets.

The double disaster of Fukushima, a natural disaster comprising an earthquake and a tsunami and a large-scale industrial nuclear disaster, behoves all countries to consider the lessons which they can draw from it.

Who hasn’t heard of the 3x20, those pillars of European energy policy? And yet who is able to give their exact definition?

A year ago, I would have responded to this question rather positively. Nowadays, I am not so sure. My relative optimism before was based on the replacement of a group of monopoly-holding (at least regionally) national operators, by an oligopoly of operators with a sizeable proportion of their activity outside of their countries of origin. These included EON, EdF, RWE, ENEL, GDFSuez, IBERDROLA, VATTENFALL and others.

On the 28th September 2010, Angela Merkel announced her government’s publication of an “energy concept” describing the target which the Federal Republic hoped to give itself regarding its energy consumption in 2050.