This Tuesday, the European Commission presents a proposal to redesign the electricity market in the European Union (EU) to make electricity prices less volatile and less dependent on gas prices, through greater access to energy renewable.
After months of serious energy crisis and having proposed various emergency measures in response, the community executive presented this Tuesday its proposal to reconfigure the European electricity market, in order to protect consumers from excessive price volatility, facilitate their access to safe energy from clean sources and make the sector more resilient.
The presentation will be made starting at 1:30 p.m. (Lisbon time) by the European Commissioner for Energy, Kadri Simson, who in an interview with the Lusa news agency at the end of last year stressed that it would be a “reform to improve the design of the electricity market.
At the time, the European supervisor told Lusa that the idea is, therefore, “to give consumers the benefits of renewable energy and low-carbon technologies at affordable prices, while preserving the benefits of a common electrical system.”
In a draft of the proposal that will be presented this Tuesday, to which Lusa has had access, the Community Executive highlights that “the measures aimed at creating a cushion between the short-term markets and the electricity bills paid by consumers, in particular promoting the long -term contracts in order to improve the functioning of the markets in the short term to better integrate renewable energies and enhance the role of flexibility and empower and protect consumers”.
Specifically, the institution considers that European consumers should be able to sign contracts at fixed electricity prices for at least one year and have access to a greater contractual choice.
At the same time, the European Commission wants to reduce the volatility of electricity prices in the European Union by reducing the influence of gas on electricity, promoting clean energy purchase and sale contracts based on default values and government guarantees.
In recent months, electricity prices have risen sharply in the EU, which has led to criticism of its formulation, conditioned by gas prices, a situation that the European Commission wants to reverse.
In the current configuration of the European market, gas determines the overall price of electricity when it is used, since all producers receive the same price for the same product — electricity — when it enters the grid.
In the EU there has been a consensus that this current model of marginal prices is the most efficient, but the acute energy crisis, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, has motivated discussion, given Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
Source: TSF
