Second Report on the State of the Energy Union

In the blog entry State of the EU Energy Union, I listed various official documents, including:

Second Report on the State of the Energy Union; Brussels, 1.2.2017 COM(2017) 53 final (15 pages)

Updated Roadmap for the Energy Union; Brussels, 1.2.2017 COM(2017) 53 final ANNEX 1 (21 pages)

The Energy Union’s five dimensions: policy observations at Member State and EU level; Brussels, 1.2.2017 COM(2017) 53 final ANNEX 2 (6 pages)

2nd report

The Second Report on the State of the Energy Union covers a lot of ground in clear prose, but I think we get the most mileage out of a fairly short excerpt if we go for the two introductory paragraphs:

For the Energy Union, 2016 was the year of delivery. It was a year in which the vision of the Energy Union Framework Strategy1 was further translated into concrete legislative and nonlegislative initiatives, most recently with the "Clean Energy for all Europeans" package presented on 30 November 2016. As a next step, the low emission mobility strategy2 will also be translated into concrete initiatives, in line with the Commission Work Programme for 2017. 3 It is important that the co-legislators work towards the adoption of the proposed initiatives without delay and in line with the Joint Declaration of the three institutions on the European Union's legislative priorities for 20174 , to allow for a swift energy transition on the ground.

The Energy Union is a European priority project, identified by the Juncker Commission as one of the 10 political priorities5 , in which five dimensions are closely interlinked: energy security, solidarity and trust; a fully integrated European energy market; energy efficiency contributing to moderation of demand; decarbonising the economy; and research, innovation and competitiveness. Progress has been made on all these dimensions.

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1 COM(2015) 80.

2 COM(2016) 501.

3 COM(2016) 710.

4 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016C1224(01)&from=EN.

5 https://ec.europa.eu/priorities/sites/beta-political/files/juncker-political-guidelines-speech_en_0.pdf; see also the European Council's Strategic Agenda for the Union in the times of change, Annex I to the European Council conclusions of 26/27 June 2014.

Updated roadmap

The annexed Updated Roadmap for the Energy Union provides the state of play: an update per 1 February 2017 for the framework strategy initiatives, which have already been adopted or where the time schedule changed. You find the references to the proposals and actions.

Policy observations

The annex on the Energy Union’s five dimensions: policy observations at Member State and EU level offers main observations which can be drawn from national developments during 2016. The policy observations are the basis for a more in-depth analysis of Member States’ policies which the Commission intends to carry out in 2017.

On six pages only, the summaries offer a good overview.

Just a reminder to those, who want more:

Monitoring progress towards the Energy Union objectives – key indicators; Brussels, 1.2.2017 SWD(2017) 32 final (137 pages)

The Commission staff working document (SWD) is presented in the following manner (pages 4 and 5):

This SWD is an update of the one presented in 2015, building on exchanges with and feedback from the Member States and taking account of stakeholder opinions collected from related reports and events. The current set of indicators may be refined in the years to come depending on the availability of data for new, more suitable indicators, and on the development of new indicators able to provide more accurate evidence on particular policy lines or sub-sectors.

• The purpose of defining a set of energy and climate indicators and reflecting them in a scoreboard is threefold:

o to streamline the monitoring process and ensure coherence in the assessment of energy and climate policies;

o to provide a commonly-agreed metric to support policy-making process by monitoring progress on EU energy and climate objectives;

o to summarise, on a scoreboard, latest data and recent changes affecting the most relevant aspects of the five dimensions of the Energy Union.

Ralf Grahn