Invited by the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), the Director of the European Commission’s DG ENER, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, set out the Commission’s position on the future of nuclear energy, while proponents of atomic energy regretted that the action plan for affordable energy prices (see EUROPE 13600/2) did not place sufficient emphasis on the principle of technological neutrality.
According to Ms Jørgensen, the plan makes clear reference to the need for clean energy to meet the EU’s decarbonisation targets, including nuclear power, and mentions the forthcoming publication of the Nuclear Illustrative Programme (PINC) to assess investment needs in the sector.
“Our assessment of how to achieve the 2040 target and climate neutrality in 2050 shows that nuclear power will continue to be needed in the European energy system, in a proportion very close to that which we have today, but that it will be necessary both to extend the life of existing nuclear power plants and to build new ones”, she explained.
However, she acknowledged that the deployment of new nuclear capacity was taking longer than that of renewables, not least because of the initial investment cost.
She also pointed out that the Commission did not currently have the instruments to intervene in national decisions to close nuclear power stations or invest in new capacity.
Nevertheless, she explained that these decisions did have an impact on overall supply across the EU and were therefore subject to “discussion with neighbouring countries and countries in the region in particular”.
Natural gas. Also asked about the Commission’s intention, detailed in the Affordable Energy Action Plan, to commit to new liquefied natural gas (LNG) contracts, in particular by financing LNG export infrastructure projects abroad (see EUROPE 13584/9), the Director explained that the EU could not yet do without natural gas and that it needed to diversify its supplies.
“We must ensure that we do not replace one dependency with another. We are now the world's biggest buyer of LNG and we will continue to be part of the common LNG market for decades to come, because we will still need fossil gas in our system”, explained Ms Jørgensen. (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)