The Spanish government accused the European Commission on Wednesday of “taking the world’s head” with its proposal for a temporary cap on the price of gas, assuring that it will “strongly oppose it.”
“We had asked the European Commission to make a proposal and, at the last moment, it presented us with this proposal, which is not,” the Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, told the press, describing it as a “joke”. the mechanism desired by Brussels.
The European Commission proposed on Tuesday a temporary mechanism to limit wholesale prices in the EU reference gas market, but with very drastic conditions to convince member states reluctant to such a device.
An “insufficient” proposal
This proposal is “clearly insufficient” and “does not go in the right direction,” protested the president of the Socialist government, Pedro Sánchez, after meeting with his Romanian counterpart Nicolae Ciuca in Castellón, in eastern Spain.
According to Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s proposal arouses “strong indignation among the majority of Member States.” Madrid “will strongly oppose” this mechanism at Thursday’s meeting of European energy ministers, she warned.
“Otherwise, we will simply stop supporting the Commission’s proposals on other issues that may be important to it,” he warned.
A mechanism triggered beyond 275 euros/MWh
The device presented by Brussels consists of limiting the prices of monthly contracts in the Dutch TTF reference market for one year. It would start up automatically as soon as these prices exceed 275 euros/MWh for two consecutive weeks.
However, monthly contracts only exceeded 275 euros/MWh this year for a very brief period at the end of August, with a peak around 350 euros, when the Twenty-seven competed to fill their reserves. And the prices are currently around 120 euros.
Asked by AFP, a spokeswoman for the Commission confirmed that given the conditions of the mechanism, it would not have triggered during the August price rise, when the ceiling of 275 euros had only been exceeded for less than two weeks. However, “we have designed” this mechanism “to anticipate and prevent this situation from occurring in the future,” she said.
Source: BFM TV
