The energy price crisis is spreading like an oil slick to the four corners of Europe and, with winter just around the corner, the sense of uncertainty is no longer a regional issue that Brussels can ignore and postpone. : the debate has impacted this week with force and urgency in all the institutions of the community bloc. From Estonia, Slovenia, Strasbourg and Luxembourg, political leaders have addressed the gas blow, its effects and possible solutions in different debates and high-level formats. Faced with pressure, Brussels slightly opens the gate of its —until now— immovable position, an opening that the most affected capitals hope to see reflected in the battery of flexibility measures that the European Commission plans to present next week.
Spain, one of the first countries to feel the crisis and raise its voice before the EU, is facing the discussion with the support of a kind of energy entente, allies on the road to energy shortages, such as France and Greece, which also They demand reforms at the community level, from a joint gas purchase platform to the modification of the current energy market. Other partners, such as Germany, for the moment do not want to hear about a thorough review of the current regulatory framework, and at best are open to studying the current situation. And a no from Germany is a negative of weight.
But the pace has been changing. The president of the Community Executive, Ursula von der Leyen, opened her hand on Tuesday and spoke of the possibility of taking measures “in the short term”, such as debating “the issue of storage, the strategic reserve [de gas]”And study” the general composition of electricity market prices, “as he assured in a hearing in Estonia. “If electricity prices are high it is because gas prices are high, and we have to study the possibility of decoupling the market, because we have much cheaper energy, such as renewables,” said Von der Leyen.
These words represent a twist in the Brussels speech. And a crack before which countries like Spain can continue to exert pressure. Upon his arrival at the EU-Balkans summit, in Brdo (Elovenia), the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, demanded this Wednesday from the Commission “extraordinary, innovative, forceful measures, to be able to contain this rise in electricity prices ”, And recalled some of the proposals that Madrid has been putting on the table in recent weeks, such as the joint purchase of gas. “We are stronger united,” he pointed out in the rain. “We also did it with the joint purchase of vaccines. This guaranteed the access of the whole of the Spanish and European population to vaccines ”.
Sánchez has also asked to review the marginalist pricing system in the continent, which, as he sees it, penalizes “renewable energy sources that are much more competitive, to the detriment of fossil fuel energy sources.” The president also raised these issues at a dinner with the 27 heads of state and government held on Tuesday night in Slovenia, despite the fact that the central topic was another – the position of the EU in the world – and that the President of the Council, Charles Michel, had proposed to postpone the energy issue until the October 21 summit.
By then the debate in Brussels should be in an advanced stage: the Commission plans to launch next week a “toolbox” with flexibility measures on which it has been working since mid-September, after feeling pressure from several countries. In principle, no audacity is expected from Brussels, but a guide with actions to which countries asphyxiated by the rise in prices can take advantage of without violating European regulations, as announced this Wednesday by the European Energy Commissioner, Kadri Simson.
The European president has listed before Parliament some of those initiatives that countries will be able to adopt “very quickly”, such as the granting of specific aid to consumers, direct payments to people with a higher risk of energy poverty, the reduction of taxes on energy and the transfer of charges to general taxation. Actions that many of the affected countries have already taken. The Estonian Commissioner has also announced a somewhat more in-depth debate for the end of the year: “I will propose a reform of the gas market and review in that context the issues related to storage and security of supply.”
Spain advocates taking the debate further, making it more urgent. From Luxembourg, where she has gone to the Council of Environment Ministers, the third vice-president, Teresa Ribera, has called on Brussels to present “exceptional” measures among that battery of tools to “respond to an exceptional situation”. A suspension of the deficit rule, but in its energy version. “We are not talking about something that has not happened before,” defended the person in charge for the Ecological Transition in a meeting with journalists. “It has happened with the spending rule. In special moments, which are absolutely out of the ordinary, some of the disciplinary rules agreed by the European institutions may be excepted ”.
“We have asked the Commission to find a way to dissociate the price of gas from the price of electricity,” said Ribera, taking up Von der Leyen’s proposals. “In parallel,” he added, “we have to ensure that Europe has a sufficient supply of gas at a reasonable price this winter, so we have proposed that there be a joint purchasing platform.”
Government sources assure that two of the measures that could be considered in an extraordinary way, while the EU faces the energy crisis, would be to extract gas from the pricing mechanism while its value is skyrocketing or to reintroduce a cap on the price of the electricity. If the Commission proposes them next week, the leaders of the Twenty-seven could assess them (and vote on them) at the October 21 summit, where an agenda item is scheduled to address this issue. As seen by the Government, the situation should be addressed at the level of political leaders, and not from the more technical services of the Community Executive.
“It is not enough only with what exists”, has claimed Ribera in his speech before his colleagues in Luxembourg. And he has accompanied his words with an EU map showing the stratospheric wholesale energy prices forecast for tomorrow (288 euros per megawatt hour in Spain; 302 in Germany and 307 in Italy, to give three examples). “In exceptional situations, exceptional measures are needed,” he insisted, assuring that the situation is already too much like the oil crisis of the 1970s.