The State of the European Union 2017

THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

2015 which set out 15 action points. Everything

you can think of when it comes to energy policy

was included, but one could argue there was no

clear indication on what were the priorities or

the level of ambition in each field. In January

2016, a paper published on the Energy Union,

as part of an initiative bringing together several

European think tanks and academics, advocat-

ed for the Energy Union to focus on three main

challenges: a more coordinated governance at

both political and technical level, a structural

reform of the electricity market design, and

stronger integration of energy policy with

Europe’s broader policy goals.

In the meantime, concrete proposals have

been made, called the Clean Energy Package.

This legislative proposal is mainly driven by elec-

tricity market logic, covering aspects of electric-

ity production, transmission, distribution and

consumption. The proposal aims to guide the

Union and its member states towards successful

integration as well as a decarbonisation of the

electricity mix. This paper aims to analyse a selec-

tion of proposals and evaluate it against the goal

of cheap, secure and sustainable energy for all,

also bearing in mind the three main challenges

we identified back in January 2016.

The complex polity of energy policy

Energy supply is at most times taken for grant-

ed. Nearly everywhere in the EU access to en-

ergy is considered as given. Hence, for most

people it ensures a certain living standard. In

Derdevet, M.; Fink, P.; Guillou, A.; Instytut Spraw Pub-

licznych; Schachtschneider, R.; Scholten, D., Schramm, C.:

New and ambitious or just more of the same? The energy

union at a crossroads. Politik für Europa #2017 plus

, Frie-

drich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, 2016.

these terms, the debate is, therefore, on the na-

ture of energy (renewable, nuclear and fossil),

the level of consumption and most certainly the

price: “Cheap, clean energy at every time of the

day, the week, the year”. Moreover, energy is an

important cross-sectional policy field, affecting

various interrelated issue areas: Climate change,

competitiveness, innovation, foreign policy,

structural policies and regional development –

to name a few. Furthermore, a common energy

policy has to deal with multiple actors with di-

vergent interests and exceedingly complex tech-

nical and legal issues. Hence, energy policy is

currently faced with tremendous challenges.

European and national energy policies have

been and still are arguably diverse and not al-

ways consistent, be it between member states

or even within a single country. This is in part

the result of the Treaties’ straightjacket, which

allows the Commission formulate objectives

and goals on European level (i.e. the 2020 goals

of the climate and energy package), but hinders

the Commission to reach them by directly influ-

encing the national energy mix. The Commission

therefore has to resort to wield its only sharp

sword: competition policy and the further de-

velopment of the common market.

Nevertheless, the decision for a rollout of re-

newable energy and the increase of energy ef-

ficiency as a means to reduce CO

emissions,

with objectives being set at European level,

eventually triggered a transformation of the

whole energy landscape. However, this process

did not take place simultaneously in all member

states. In the beginning, energy transformation

was driven by only a few member states, imple-

menting national legislation and designing their

own support schemes. By now, we face a situa-

tion where all of this has to be put together in a

functioning Europe-wide system. Each member

state by itself is not able to be successful and