On Monday, 16 February, the think tank Bruegel stressed in a new publication dedicated to European electricity grid planning that it is necessary to increase transparency and strengthen coordination at the EU level.
This analysis falls within the current policy debate surrounding the ‘Grids Package’ presented last December, which advocates that grid planning be more integrated at the European level (see EUROPE 13770/4).
According to the authors, the transparency of national plans and policies on energy system development must be improved with open data and modelling. They notably object to how opaque and inaccessible National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) are in their current form.
Among other ideas, they propose that an EU Energy Data Hub be created to aggregate, clean, and publish up-to-date energy data to address “the current reliance on opaque, fragmented and often private sources”.
This hub would eventually need to be transformed into an EU Energy Agency so as to institutionalise the process of collecting data as well as that of monitoring and modelling coherent policies.
The analysis also highlights that grid planning needs to be better integrated into political objectives across borders and that the harmonisation of national plans and policies needs to be strengthened.
The authors stress, “While countries would continue to decide on their own energy mixes, this approach would ensure transparency and justify projects based on European welfare rather than special interests.”
In their view, national plans’ credibility would depend on their “links to EU policies, such as State aid approval or subsidies for infrastructure projects”.
The analysis: https://aeur.eu/f/krn (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)