Brussels, 27/05/2015 (Agence Europe) - The Czech authorities, which will take over the Presidency of the Visegrad Group (V-4: Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) on 1 July, will put energy union at the heart of their agenda, Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka pledged at a meeting with Energy Union Commissioner Maros Sefcovic, in Prague on Tuesday 26 May.
“Completion of the internal energy market is the Czech priority in the project of the Energy Union. The Czech government will insist on the creation of its own energy mix including nuclear power”, Sobotka is reported as saying by the Czech press agency CTK. Prague will push to ensure that the three European objectives - energy security, energy supply at affordable prices and environmental protection - are observed equally, he said.
In Prague on Tuesday, Sefcovic was continuing his dialogue tour with the member states on energy union, which will feed into the first report on the state of the energy union, which the Commission will present in October and which will be an important tool in monitoring the progress made at European, national and regional levels to implement this project, which is extremely important to the Juncker Commission. On 18 May (see EUROPE 11316), Sefcovic drew up an inventory of the initiatives carried out at European level to bring energy union, the strategic framework for which was presented in February of this year, into being (see EUROPE 11262).
In Prague on Tuesday, Sefcovic also presented the principal objectives of energy union at the 10th European Nuclear Energy Forum (26-27 May). Within this framework, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico stressed that this project should include two objectives which may seem to conflict with each other: the development of energy, collectively, and the energy mixes of the member countries, individually. “Slovakia has no problem to accept energy mixes of its neighbours and expects its neighbours to hold the same opinion”, he said, stressing that Bratislava supports nuclear energy. (Emmanuel Hagry)