Towards a balanced European energy system

Key Points

The EESC:

• considers energy affordability, carbon neutrality and energy security to be the core objectives of a balanced energy system;

• emphasizes the need to maintain baseload generation and a diverse clean energy mix to balance supply and demand, including intermittent and constant production, controllable and non-controllable sources and regional energy differences;

• supports the call by the Commission to recommend that Member States temporarily lower taxes and levies to curb high costs as stated in the Affordable Energy Action Plan;

• proposes a flexible but firm roadmap for fossil-fuel-dependent Member States, with EU and national cooperation;

• notes the need to increase flexibility and efficiency, emphasizes the role of active demand management and smart consumption, and calls for awareness campaigns, efficiency-enhancing solutions, and business models that promote the pooling of resources between small consumers and producers;

• calls for faster cross-border interconnections and modernisation of infrastructure to complete the Energy Union and strengthen internal energy flows, especially in the wake of the recent blackout in Spain and Portugal;

• calls for an examination of how to make better use of underexploited sources (e.g. geothermal energy for electricity, biogas for local production) and to accelerate innovation (efficiency, digitalisation, grid flexibility, sectoral integration);

• recommends making decentralised renewable energy production (prosumers and energy communities) more accessible by removing regulatory gaps and tackling conflicts of interest;

• proposes the development of a European Transient Stability Action Plan including mandatory standards for synthetic inertia, transient response testing for new assets, and annual assessments of the power system’s resilience to rapid disturbances to prevent widespread grid failures.

Practical information

The EU Youth Test at the EESC was applied to this opinion. Human Development Research Initiative was chosen by a group of interested youth organisations to represent all of them during the opinion-making process.