European Union News - Energy

The Official Journal of the European Union published on 6 November 2010 Commission's Decision C(2010) 7499, laying down the criteria and measures for the financing of commercial demonstration projects that aim at the environmentally safe capture and geological storage of CO2, as well as demonstration projects of innovative renewable energy technologies under the scheme for greenhouse gas emission allowance trading within the Community.

The European Commission has put forward on 3 November a proposal for Council Directive including safety standards for disposing spent fuel and radioactive waste from nuclear power plants as well as from medicine or research. With this Directive internationally agreed safety standards become legally binding and enforceable in the European Union.

The European Commission published on 29 October its Guidelines for wind energy development in protected natural areas. These guidelines will apply to the Natura 2000 network, a cornerstone of EU biodiversity policy and a key tool to achieve the EU target of halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2020.

MEPs meeting within the Energy Committee adopted a report putting forward Parliament's priorities for the European Energy Strategy 2011-2020. In this resport, the Committee urged the European Commission to fully exploit existing EU energy legislation and projects and put energy efficiency as a key priority of Europe's energy strategy for 2011-2020.

The European Commission has put forward a Communication on the safety of oil and gas activities, which includes criteria for granting drilling permits, controls of the rigs and safety control mechanisms.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 has been jointly awarded to Professor Konstantin Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim of the University of Manchester in the UK. Novoselov and Geim have been awarded this Prize for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.

The European Commission will allocate 4 million Euro to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and imports, to improve security of their energy supply in 13 countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian Federation (as observer), Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Technological advances are making it possible to derive energy from greener sources, but wind turbines, solar panels, biofuels, biomass plants or carbon capture and storage (CSS) are not free of controversy. How to gain public acceptance of these new technologies? That was the debate at the workshop “Public acceptance of new energy technologies. Not in my backyard?” held at the Open Days on 5 October.