Brussels, 15/09/2003 (Agence Europe) - The common position on the cogeneration directive was formally approved by the Council of Ministers, by written procedure on 8 September.
Within the context of the European strategy for improving energy output, the proposal aims to support and facilitate the construction and the working of cogeneration plants for the simultaneous production of heat and electricity, through Member State support programmes. High output cogeneration is defined as allowing primary energy savings of at least 10% to be made. Electricity thus produced will benefit from the guarantee that it will have access to the network on the basis of public access conditions and tariffs, transport and distribution guarantees on the basis of objective and transparent criteria.
A unanimous political agreement had been reached at the Council of Ministers on Energy on 14 May (see EUROPE of 15 May, p.8). The Council had introduced several amendments to the Commission's proposal: - harmonisation of reference output values through comitology procedure, it no longer being left up to each Member State; - introduction of greater flexibility in the method for calculating energy savings; - request for a guarantee of origin, allowing it to be certified that the electricity produced is from cogeneration, exclusively by the producer; - facilitated access to the electricity grid for low capacity installations; - abolition of the reference to a threshold for public aid capacity, the text referring to the guidelines relating to State aid in the field of environmental protection. These changes should, as far as EUROPE can determine from indications given, receive a favourable opinion from the European Commission by 19 September. The common position will be sent to the European Parliament which has three months in which to carry out a second reading of the directive. In first reading, MEPs, on the basis of a report by Norbert Glante (PES, Germany) adopted on 13 May, had adopted 74 amendments of which 49 were taken up in full or in part in the amended proposal presented by the Commission on 23 July. Differences now only concern three points essentially: the method for calculating energy savings, the establishment of specific support in favour of micro-cogeneration, and the timetable for implementing the directive that the MEPs hope to speed up.