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29th Mar 2024

Brussels urges action on EU blackout threat

EU states should sign up to European Commission reforms on the internal market for energy if they want to avoid the kind of blackouts seen in November last year, Brussels said Tuesday (30 January), trying to steer a middle way between advice and alarmism.

"I wouldn't say today there exists the risk of a blackout," energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs said. "But some issues must be addressed, actions must be taken at EU level so that human error cannot trigger a blackout causing small suffering for 15 million European citizens."

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More than 15 million people in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain lost electricity for a few minutes on 4 November last year, after a worker at German firm E.ON switched off a high-voltage line to let a ship pass below, causing a domino effect of power overloads.

E.ON has since admitted blame and could face legal action - stopping a toaster for five minutes in a French home is no big deal, but stopping, say, a giant paper-making machine at a factory in Germany can take several hours to restart and cause hundreds of thousands of euros in loss.

A fresh report into the November cuts by the Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) paints a worrying picture of an E.ON man with his finger on the switch, but with inadequate security standards to keep him in check and no system to warn operators in other EU states of what he is doing.

On top of this, there was insufficient investment in the northwest and southern European electricity grid, especially in the area of cross-border interconnectors, to help with "the disconnection and reconnection of loads" in case of "disturbances."

"All [electricity regulators'] efforts face clear enforceability limits due to non-harmonised current legal and regulatory frameworks," UCTE president Jose Penedos said, standing next to Mr Piebalgs in Brussels. UCTE sees EU action in the sphere "a must-be development" and is in "a very good mood to cooperate" he added.

"[The UCTE report] is a very important step for further correlation of the European market, unfortunately it was triggered by a blackout," Mr Piebalgs went on. "Europe should draw lessons from this...and develop stronger network security standards."

The commission's remedy - to "gradually" move from national to regional-level grid coordinators and to break up giants like E.ON or France's EDF into smaller pieces to stimulate competition and investment in new interconnectors - was already outlined in a 10 January blueprint for a new EU energy policy.

Uphill struggle

Mr Piebalgs could face an uphill struggle getting EU states to sign up to the scheme at the next EU summit in March however, with pressure from EU capitals already forcing Brussels to ditch 2006 proposals for an EU-wide electricity regulator and to soften the E.ON and EDF-type company break-up plans.

The 10 January paper suggested a "less ambitious" option on so-called "unbundling" of energy giants that would allow firms to keep gas and oil pipelines on paper but surrender control of their upstream assets to an "independent system operator" (ISO) to break their unhelpful strangle-hold on national power supply.

Some analysts see the commission's ISO option as a compromise offer, which would see EU states give Brussels something on cross-border grid regulation and security standards (but not full-blown EU-level regulation) in return for the commission backing down on full unbundling of energy champions.

But even here the energy lobby plans to put up a fight, with EDF bosses rejecting the commission's ISO model the day it was released and E.ON chief Wulf Bernotat telling press 14 days later that he "rejects ownership unbundling and the ISO model."

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