The Energy Union: Views from France, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom
Report published by Instytut Spraw Publicznych (ISP) and presented at the 1-2 July 2015 conference organised by ISP, Stiftung Genshagen and Ifri: "Energy Union - Germany, France and Poland between common European goals and divergent national approaches". Melchior Szczepanik (ISP) and Carole Mathieu (Ifri Centre for Energy) co-authored the chapter dedicated to the French perspective on the Energy Union.
Ifri’s conference on the New Frontiers of Energy Identified Strategic Orientations for the European Energy Union
The Ifri Center for Energy held its annual conference in Brussels on March 4th, 2015. The event gathered more than 150 participants, together with prominent policy makers, industry leaders and distinguished academics to discuss how the European energy policy can deliver effective results in light of geopolitical upheavals, technological developments and governance issues.
To download the presentations, click here
The European Energy Policy: Building New Perspectives
“After 17 years of supranationality, we are still seeking how to define a common energy policy and what it might be. [...] Could we have done more in one generation? Or were goals only established to achieve a political balance which it was explicitly agreed to ignore, once the machinery began to operate? Historians will have a hard task to distinguish between excessive ambitions and national hypocrisies”.
Commission Communication of the EU Energy External Policy: Was There an Alternative?
EU is the world’s largest net energy importer and consumer, so why do its Members continue to negotiate individually with the rest of the world rather than as one big market with a big voice?
European Energy Policy: Energy Savings Glass 2/3 Empty
Summing up Europe’s climate policies suggests we still haven’t grasped the full potential for energy savings. We act as if we were living in a system with infinite resources easily exploited by human innovation and ingenuity. We focus on the efficiencies we can gain from components of our system, but not on the system as a whole and we do not consider how the other billions of people on earth can achieve our level of comfort with a resource or carbon-constrained future and with aspirations that necessarily imply sharply growing energy consumption.
Energy Efficiency: The Commission's Complicated Calculations
Who hasn’t heard of the 3x20, those pillars of European energy policy? And yet who is able to give their exact definition?
Will there ever be a European Gas and Electricity Market ?
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.
Energy Efficiency: Smart but not Sexy
Marie C. DONNELLY, DG Energy, reported that the EU is “unlikely to achieve a 20% reduction on the current set of policies” [1] by 2020. According to her, based on a modelling exercise, the estimate of energy savings “would be somewhere between 9 and 11% on current policies” in spite of the contribution of the economic crisis to decreasing the EU primary energy consumption.
Saving Wind from its Subsidies
European subsidies for wind energy are too high and unspecific. They risk frustrating their own objective.
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