Brussels (awp/afp) – The European Union (EU) announced on Monday that it was preparing “an emergency intervention” and “a structural reform” of the European electricity market. The operation of the latter is increasingly criticized in the face of the mad surge in prices.
Such a reform, demanded for a long time by France but which divided the Twenty-Seven, will be on the menu of a meeting of EU energy ministers on September 9 in Brussels. “The soaring electricity prices clearly show the limits of the current functioning of the market. This had been designed in a very different context”, admitted Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, during a conference in Bled (Slovenia).
“That is why we are currently working on emergency intervention and structural reform of the market,” she said, without further details. The September 9 date was announced on Monday by Czech Industry Minister Jozef Sikela, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency. “We need to fix the energy market. The solution at EU level is by far the best,” he tweeted.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also urged member states on Monday to agree “rapidly” and in a “coordinated manner” on a reform. The current system “cannot be described as functional if it leads to such high electricity prices,” he said.
Calls to change the common electricity market grow as, after six months of war in Ukraine, energy prices soar to stratospheric levels, raising fears of a winter cost of living explosion next.
On the European market, it is the cost price of the last source of electricity mobilized to meet demand, often gas-fired power stations, which determines the price imposed on all operators on the continent. This price soared in concert with the surge in gas prices linked to the drastic drop in Russian gas deliveries to Europe.
On Sunday, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer called on the EU to “decouple the price of electricity from that of gas” to “stop this madness”. According to him, this decoupling will be on the menu of the September 9 talks. On the same day, Belgian Energy Minister Tinne Van der Straeten called for reform of “a failed market”, which is “no longer tenable for many consumers and families”.
This decoupling was demanded by Paris, which believes that French consumers are penalized, prevented from fully benefiting from the low costs of nuclear power by a mechanism deemed “obsolete”. Last year, in a joint statement published in October 2021, nine member states, including Germany, fiercely opposed any reform of the electricity market, deeming the current system effective in “contributing to innovation ” and “facilitate the transition” to green energies.
afp/vj