Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-29-Speech-3-210"
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"Mr President, firstly I would like to congratulate Mr Turmes on the report which he has prepared, as it will be of great use to the Commission’s work. I would like to remind you that in April last year the Commission approved a working paper on electricity from renewable sources, whose main objective was to present a thorough overview of the support programmes of the different Member States in the field of renewable energies, as well as to highlight certain conclusions and possible options for the adoption of Community measures in this area.
In the proposal for a directive, we hope to include some objectives chosen by countries, that is, individual objectives for each country in the European Union. These would not be compulsory objectives, but ones which can produce results, at least from the political point of view, and I think that this would be a very important step.
I agree with Mr Turmes on the need to protect the different national systems in force at the time that this directive is adopted. This is what we will do, which does not mean that, in five years time, there should not be a review of the different systems and that we should not commit ourselves to those which have proved to be the most effective and which have resulted in greater development of renewable energies in those countries.
In any event, as you know, on 2 December 1999, in the Energy Council, I gave a questionnaire to the Member States, so I could see what stage we had reached, what stage the issue had reached, and so I could present a directive that could obtain sufficient consensus to quickly conclude its passage through both Parliament and the Council. The result of this questionnaire, which has been studied by the services, is a document, in my opinion, of extremely high quality, which I hope will enable us to get through the Parliamentary and Council procedures reasonably quickly. Let us state quite clearly that the proposal simply and straightforwardly seeks to stimulate production in the EU of electricity from renewable energies.
I would like to point out that I have taken careful note of Mr Linkohr’s words on agricultural policy and the possibility of encouraging non-food production. As a former agriculture minister, I am sensitive to these issues and this is one which, to a certain extent, is also covered in this proposal.
I would also like to point out that our objective in all of this is to have a safer and more reliable supply of energy, which treats the EU’s environment with greater respect.
To conclude, Mr President, other speakers have mentioned repayment. Mr Vidal-Quadras and Mr Valdivielso both mentioned this a while ago. Renewable energies today are not competitive in relation to traditional energies, particularly as traditional energies have certain external costs which, of course, are not internalised.
Support must be given to renewable energies. My personal view – although there are other ideas on this subject – is that, as things stand, we cannot write off other energies, for reasons of competitiveness and growth. We can, however, support renewable energies, precisely because they are obviously based on respect for the environment and on reducing emissions. In this respect, we must be able to ensure that those who do commit themselves to renewables have a fair return on their investments. We obviously have to create a stable framework that will enable investors to make investments which require a sufficient number of years to cover their repayment. This is one of the issues under discussion in the Commission and which has proved to be more difficult in some cases, together with certain other aspects. But, ultimately, everyone in the Commission agrees on the need to encourage green energy.
Mr President, I would like to thank the rapporteur and all the speakers, and to assure them that this element of stability, which will enable decisions relating to medium-term investments to be taken, will also feature in the proposal for a directive that I hope to be able to present to you soon.
On that occasion the Commission indicated in its working paper that it had not reached a final conclusion and that a final decision would be adopted on all the issues involved in the light of reactions to the paper itself. In this respect, Parliament’s contribution is an extremely important element in this process. This House has always been forthright in its support for active policies designed to promote renewable energies. I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate my thanks to Mr Turmes for his work. Furthermore, and as Mr Linkohr has pointed out, it must be said that it is Parliament that has, in part, forced the Commission to undertake more concrete action in the area of renewable energies and that Parliament has always been a leader and a driving force in this area.
We all agree that renewable energies have to play a key role in guaranteeing our supply of energy, as well as making us less dependent on imports and in fulfilling the commitments we gave in Kyoto. However, they can also help the EU’s technological development and enable us to export clean technologies to other parts of the world.
I must point out that Mr Turmes’s report fully concurs with these views. The Commission is already giving its support to the production of wind, solar and biomass energy, small hydroelectric stations and geothermal energy, that is all sources of renewable energy, with the exception of large hydraulic power stations, which we feel we should not support because they have sufficient options available to them. Furthermore, they have some extremely negative aspects from an environmental point of view, as constructing a dam always involves flooding a valley.
I must, however, say to Mr Turmes that, despite what I have just said, we cannot consider peat to be a renewable energy.
The ALTENER programme is enabling magnificent work to take place and Parliament has always been an ally of the Commission. It has always cooperated with the efforts of the Commission and, I repeat, has even been a driving force in making the Commission’s proposals more ambitious.
We are now faced with a considerable challenge, which is to establish the most appropriate mechanisms for supporting the development of green electricity in an internal market, an open single electricity market, which is what we are trying to achieve in the European Union.
I can assure you that all issues that have been highlighted here will be carefully considered in relation to the directive on which discussions will begin in the next few days.
Going into specific issues, almost all of the points made in Mr Turmes’s report deserve our support and fully concur with our own studies. Some aspects are more open to debate, but they also deserve thorough study, even if they must be rejected, in some cases because they are not sufficiently based on fact or because the problems they present are greater than the solutions they propose. I must repeat that the report stresses the importance of the objective of doubling, from 6% to 12%, the proportion of renewable energy sources in the gross domestic consumption of energy."@en1
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