Despite the work done by the Polish Presidency of the EU Council, “further work will be necessary in order to reconcile the positions of the delegations”, the Presidency stressed in a progress report on the Energy Taxation Directive (ETD), obtained on Wednesday 11 June by Agence Europe.
“In the view of the Presidency, the state of play of the negotiations represents a delicate balance between different views of delegations, factoring in also the aspect of competitiveness which has been recently highlighted by many delegations”, it said. Indeed, in light of the European Commission’s communications on EU competitiveness, in particular the ‘Clean Industrial Deal’ (see EUROPE 13587/2), the Presidency felt that energy-intensive sectors, such as mineralogical and metallurgical processes, needed greater support. It therefore considered justifiable allowing Member States to continue providing support to these sectors in the form of an exclusion from the directive’s scope.
In May, it proposed an assessment of the environmental performance of energy products (see EUROPE 13639/2). Initially, it was stated that the EU Council could adopt implementing acts to modify an energy product’s category when this category is incompatible with its environmental performance. However, it was pointed out during the discussion that under the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), the basic act cannot normally be amended by an implementing act. Modification of the energy product category could be considered an essential element of the proposal relating to the energy labelling directive. It became apparent that a legally viable option would be to transform the empowerment into a review clause and the Presidency revised the compromise text accordingly.
In addition, “the delegations repeated their well-known positions on some other issues”, it reported. However, Poland has not reopened discussions on these issues, as it believes that they have been extensively debated in previous years and that the text represents a fragile compromise.
Read the progress report: https://aeur.eu/f/h9a (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)