For the EU the priority for the coming years is to “build a common energy infrastructure” on a European scale, while ensuring that energy is “an enabler of peace and prosperity”.
EU welcomed the fact that all legislative dossiers in the energy field had been finalised under the Spanish Presidency of the Council and highlighted the work of the Belgian Presidency to ensure “a smooth formal adoption process”.
“Now is the time for implementation”, the Commission insisted throughout the discussions with the European Parliament.
An informal meeting of energy ministers on 15 and 16 April 2024 will be devoted exclusively to the subject of European networks.
“If we don’t have a network, we won’t be able to solve the problem (of deploying renewable energies)”, said the Belgian Minister for Energy, Tinne Van der Straeten.
“We have an ambitious target for renewables, which also comes with its own challenges, such as production intermittency. We therefore need to include these concepts in the issue of network expansion in order to implement the target (on renewables) as quickly as possible”, she added.
In addition to developing networks, Belgian priorities include a strategy for importing hydrogen into the EU.
Christophe Grudler MEP (Renew Europe, French) expressed his regret at this point, as “first of all we need to have means of production in Europe. And if we can’t, we can resort to imports. But this only comes later”.
The exchange also focused on the EU’s continuing dependence on Russian fossil fuels, a subject addressed by Bronis Ropė (Greens/EFA, Lithuanian).
On this point, the Belgian minister felt that we needed to “work proactively” to reduce imports of fossil fuels from Russia from the current level of around 10% to 0% well before 2030.
Asked specifically about Belgium as a transit corridor for Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) by Ciarán Cuffe (Greens/EFA, Irish), the minister acknowledged that the question remained open as to the contracts that Belgium had signed before the war for the import and re-export of Russian gas.
