The European Union reached a political agreement on Thursday to reform the common electricity market, boosting the deployment of renewable energy and promoting stable and affordable prices for consumers.
“It’s done,” the chief negotiator of the European Parliament (EP), Nicolás González Casares, told the EFE news agency, when speaking about the political agreement reached between the EP, the Council of the EU and the European Commission, after ten hours of negotiations in Strasbourg, France.
Agreement that still needs to be ratified by the EU Council, which represents the Member States, and the EP.
This is a market adjustment designed at the height of the 2021 and 2022 energy price crisis and aims to move the EU closer to climate goals and away from Russia’s 27 hydrocarbons.
The pact includes several measures to strengthen consumer protection and establishes criteria allowing the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, to declare an energy crisis.
States should take measures to reduce prices for vulnerable and disadvantaged customers, with provisions to prevent “excessive distortions of the internal market”, the council said in a statement.
“Consumer protection has been significantly strengthened,” explains González Casares, adding that the pact also prevents companies from “unilaterally changing contracts” and stating that “member states will guarantee that consumers are fully protected from cuts.”
The biggest obstacle in the process occurred before the final negotiations between the Council and the European Parliament and arose in the confrontation between Paris and Berlin over Contracts for Difference (CfD) and its application to the operation of nuclear power plants.
CfDs allow the state to agree a stable price with a producer for the purchase and sale of electricity over a fixed period, and automatically refund the difference depending on whether the final price is higher or lower than the agreed price.
The reform includes, in parallel, a regulation (REMIT) to improve protection against market manipulation, which was agreed in November.
In March this year, the European Commission presented a proposal for the design of the market, which was previously worked on together with the Member States to enable rapid processing.
Nine months later, an agreement was reached on the first deep reform of the electricity market in twenty years, a pact that, if there are no surprises, will be officially adopted in early 2024.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the adjustment on Wednesday, when referring to the six months of Spain’s presidency of the Council of the EU before the European Parliament’s plenary session, as a “historic reform of the electricity market”.
“In addition to promoting the need to boost renewable energy, it will make electricity prices lower and more stable, make the system more transparent and therefore more information for consumers” and “protect citizens from possible abuse by energy multinationals,” he claimed.
Source: DN
