Report urges single energy grid

By Claire Compton and Cat Contiguglia

Staff Writers

The European Union's energy model needs to be more ambitious and at the same time more effective, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) said in its new Energy Strategy 2011/2012, which it adopted at its plenary session held Dec. 8-9.

The EESC is a consultant body to the European Union and advises on a comprehensive range of issues including agriculture, the environment, civil society, consumers, economics and energy. The European Commission has sought out opinions for its ongoing work on its medium-term energy strategy.

A successful energy policy that promotes renewable energy at a faster pace would in fact make the EU more competitive, the authors wrote, but only if efforts are careful in order to avoid pricey policies, like the solar fiasco in the Czech Republic.

Part of the problem is the pricing of the energy itself. While fossil fuels are inexpensive for end-users, those prices fail to take into account externalities, like pollution, that in fact make the fuel much more expensive.

"From an economist's perspective, the single most important means of bringing about the necessary transformation of the energy sector is to price energy properly, including all the externalities of its production and use," said Bernardo Hernández Bataller, the rapporteur of the opinion and a member of the EESC, in an interview with The Prague Post. "While this is less and less contested as a principle, this is currently very far from the case throughout the world."

The EESC believes the EU's energy policies depend on three pillars: security of supply, low-carbon economy and energy competitiveness. But of these three, the EESC says the EU is getting competition wrong. Renewable energies must continue to be promoted, but they will only become efficient if the EU begins to build a better energy grid, one that connects renewable energies where they are best suited and establishes a single European grid, Bataller said.

"In order to secure the most efficient results from renewables, there should be a preference for installing the different kinds of renewable energy in the locations that are optimal for each," he said. "For example, wind energy where it is windiest, solar energy where it is sunniest, etc. - and then relying on an efficient grid to transfer energy where it is needed."

The opinion from the EESC was particularly relevant to renewable energy policies in the Czech Republic, which have sometimes proved to be over compensatory and self-defeating. For much of the year, the government was caught in a tug-of-war over energy policy that in several instances has been criticized by industry analysts for not being beneficial for investors and for not promoting clean energy. To make up for previous legislation that over-calculated subsidies for solar companies, the government has passed two amendments to limit expansion of the solar industry, which has caused some investors to pull out of the renewable sector in the country.

A completely new renewable energy act is to be voted on soon that limits growth in renewable energy even further to avoid a repeat of the "solar boom," but it supports biomass cogeneration plants that co-fire both biomass and fossil fuels to produce electricity and heat, which still create harmful emissions.

The writers can be reached at

business@praguepost.com