Clean Energy Package

The EU appears poised to roll out battery storage capacity to provide flexibility to systems with more variable renewables. The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy has also noted policies that must be addressed to establish a level playing field for storage.

European Parliament groupings, renewable energy associations and climate activists have voiced disappointment at the EU Climate Law officially unveiled yesterday. Lack of a raised emission-reduction ambition to 2030 is at the heart of the opposition, with critics saying the plan will be insufficient to help prevent global temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The two documents urge member countries to adopt more favorable legislative frameworks to help improve operation of renewables and distributed generation in relation to other energy networks of gas or heat. The new provisions are also expected to facilitate the development of energy communities and aggregators, while opening the market for flexibility services to small power producers.

Consumer- and municipally-owned energy systems are lauded as key elements of the energy transition. However, their market design in many regions is still prohibitively complex. The European Committee of the Regions has presented a policy recommendation to address these issues, and enable a just and democratic energy transition.

According to the EU Commissioner for Energy and Climate Action, Arias Cañete, negotiations among all EU members on final target are still ongoing, and face several issues.

The Clean Energy Industrial Forum will be part of the Clean Energy for All Europeans package, which is setting the energy strategy of the Old Continent for the period 2020-2030.

ACER and CEER have asked the European Commission to take a more market-oriented approach for the Clean Energy Package 2020-2030. The two organizations called on Brussels to remove priority dispatch for existing renewables and to avoid net metering.