European Union News - Energy

The European Commission adopted on 8 March a Plan aimed to improve energy efficiency in the European Union by the implementation of concrete measures. These measures would create important benefits for households, businesses as well as public authorities, and could represent annual savings of 1.000 euro per household.

The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measurement standard has been chosen by Government organisations in three continents as the common standard for measuring the energy efficiency of data centres. This will allow data centre operators to measure, calculate, improve and communicate the energy efficiencies of their data centres worldwide. Although global taskforce has reached agreement on measurement protocols for PUE, the discussion still continues over additional energy efficiency metrics.

Energy Commissioner Oettinger and Prime Minister of Slovenia Borut Pahor inaugurated on 3 March the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Agency will help removing technical obstacles to cross-border energy trade, and will coordinate activities of national energy regulators helping to solve possible conflicts between them. The opening of the agency coincides with the coming into force of the third energy package on internal market.

At its meeting held in Brussels on 28 February, the Energy Council was was briefed on the state of play of discussions on the draft regulation on energy market integrity and transparency aimed at setting up a framework for monitoring wholesale energy markets in order to detect market abuse and manipulation. The Commission considers that, although market abuse and manipulation relating to financial instruments in general are already covered by other legal provisions, the particular nature of the market for gas and electricity required a separate instrument.

The need to shift economies onto a lower carbon route and to acknowledge the direct links between the resilience of ecosystems and that of national economies were highlighted by the Prince of Wales at the opening of Parliament's Low Carbon Prosperity Summit held on 9 February. In his speech, the Prince of Wales stressed the need to move away from conventional economic models based on the production of high carbon intensity products, in line with the overall objective of the Summit which was to find a way for a new low-carbon economy in Europe.

While EU Heads of State and Government debated in Brussels about the future of EU energy policy and the ways to ensure safe, secure, sustainable and affordable energy for Europe, the Open Knowledge Foundation presented its project Europe's Energy. Thanks to this portal citizens will have access to a set of visual tools to put these targets into context and to understand and compare how progress is being made towards them in different countries.

The European Commission has presented EU's flagship initiative for a resource-efficient Europe, which provides a long-term framework for actions in many policy areas, supporting policy agendas for climate change, energy, transport, industry, raw materials, agriculture, fisheries, biodiversity and regional development. This strategy is the seventh and last of the Europe 2020 flagship initiatives which aim at building smart, sustainable and inclusive growth for Europe.

This is one of the main conclusions drawn from the Report of the European expert group on future transport fuels, which has been presented to the European Commission. This report, which for the first time has developed a comprehensive approach covering the whole transport sector, affirms that the European Union will have to move to an oil-free and largely CO2-free energy supply for transport if it wants to meet the objectives set in terms of environmental impact and security of energy supply.