Fsr Energy & Climate

Jean-Michel Glachant ponders local markets as potential for "incredible breaking of the whole European project" Recorded at the European University Institute, June 17 2016 Jean-Michel Glachant has provided our podcast listeners with an insight into the frank discussions between leading regulators, stakeholders and executives at the FSR Executive Seminar: “Integrating the Operation of EU Power Systems?" . This involved views on market coupling, because “solar and wind do not produce energy in the same way so they do not ask for same pricing mechanism in the market.” Glachant also remarked that the idea of dividing the European market into smaller local markets could lead to an “incredible breaking of the whole European project.” The seminar also dealt with capacity adequacy and capacity mechanisms. Glachant points out that Germany, with its formidable investment in renewable energy, should have been the driver of capacity mechanisms but that in reality the nation remains skeptical about the accuracy of this

Professor David Newbery is the founder and director of the Energy Policy Research Group at Cambridge Univeristy. Here, he talks to Jean-Michel Glachant about the rapid transition in between centralised planning and the new world of non-stop investment in renewables. Recorded in Cambridge, England May 13 2016. "It's a revolution in the sense that the system of regulation is based on trying to create stability and predictability in the charger regime. That's fine if you've got plenty of time. So the thing that has revolutionised the electricity system is the speed with which things can change." "It's not so much a revolution of technology, these technologies have been around." "We have to think very carefully about what the principles are for connecting and charging for connecting to the system. And we have to get around the problem of regulatory stability by giving people longer term contracts when they connect which allow them to predict what their charges are."

Steven Weissman from the University of Berkeley California discusses the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan in relation to the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Clean Power Plan aims to reduce the high level of green house gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, requiring each state to develop a plan to directly or indirectly tackle the level of emissions. It would be major element of the US's efforts to comply with the terms of the Paris Agreement. But, what are the legal implications of such a plan and will it be enforced?

At the International Energy Agency in Paris, 28 April 2016, Jean-Michel Glachant - Director of the Florence School of Regulation, interviews Fulvio Fontini, an expert on European capacity mechanisms, he works for both the Italian regulator (Autorita per l'Energia Elettrica il Gas) and CEER. “Administrative borders don’t have any effect on electrons, so we need to deal with the typology of the system” “There is an issue of security of supply, which is still a national issues, this is what the European legislation prescribes… this is the way that we set up our rules, whatever can be done at national level should be done at national level providing that it is homogenised” “One dimension of capacity is the dimension of assessing security of supply, whether it is effectively needed or not that you have a capacity mechanism, and what are the consequences of introducing capacity mechanisms for security of supply”

Jean-Michel Glachant - Director of the Florence School of Regulation, interviews Claude Turmes, MEP on European energy security of supply. Recorded at the International Energy Agency in Paris, 28 April 2016 Claude Turmes has been a leading influence in European energy policy for more than 15 years, he is a Green MEP for Luxembourg and a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy. “I think our biggest [security of supply] problem in this moment is over capacity, we have so much coal and nuclear running despite the fact that we have deliberately decided to bring a lot of renewables to the system” “(On gas security of supply) In Europe we optimised already our grid system and our methodology and our ability to deal with a crisis after the 2004-6 crisis with Russia and Ukraine, and now the issue is more to get pressure on member states… it is good that we work on the Gas security supply legislation which the European Commission proposed, but the bigger picture is how do

http://fsr.eui.eu/event/real-value-paris-agreement/ Video version available from the link above The Paris Agreement undoubtedly forms a milestone in the fight against climate change. It sets the framework for the first long-term global common action against greenhouse gas emissions, by both developed and developing countries. The coming period up to 2020 will tell whether the structure and rules of the new treaty form a workable framework to tackle climate change and keep the global temperature rise well below 2C above pre-industrial levels. One of the first challenges in this respect will be to strenghten the commitments of the parties, as the combined effect of their current contributions would bring up the temperature far more than 2°C.

Director of the Energy Law and Policy Area, Professor Leigh Hancher (EUI, Tilburg University) opens the podcast series by discussing recent case law and developments concerning national price regulation, especially the regulation of retail price markets. While wholesale price regulation has been explicitly forbidden since the Directives from the Second Package of 2003, retail price regulation remains rather unclear. This podcast examines the recent ruling following the infringement procedure issued by the Commission against the Polish government on their system of regulating gas prices, which restricted the free setting of gas prices by the market, and the interpretation of the Public Service Obligation Provision, in Article 3 Paragraph 2 of the current gas directive under the Third Energy Package of 2009. This case is considered alongside the Federutility case of 2010, an important precedent, which concerned an Italian regulation, introduced in July 2007. The regulation imposed a price reference system on th

Helmut Schmitt von Sydow, Professor in Parma & Lausanne, and former Director & Chief Legal Advisor at DG Energy, European Commission. At the EU Energy Law & Policy Conference, 9 February 2016, Jean-Michel Glachant, Director of the Florence School of Regulation, talks with Helmut Schmitt von Sydow, about the formation of the European Energy Union. “At first sight it seems like old wine in new bottles” “For some items, it’s just revigorating the policy and giving it new drive… the main new thing in the energy union is the security item, and that’s in reality foreign policy” “[The European Commission] have already come up with a lot of progress on the external front, in the past the European Union did not dare to deal with external relations with member states… The first step was they had to take account of the existing agreements, instead of going right away to the Court of Justice and speaking of external competences and so on, trade commercial policy, they did it in a slowly normal community method, to take s

Georg Zachmann is a Research Fellow at the European think tank Bruegel At the EU Energy Law & Policy Conference, 9 February 2016, Jean-Michel Glachant, Director of the Florence School of Regulation, talks with Georg Zachmann about the problems facing the European energy mix. “Member states very directly or indirectly, as much as Brussels allows, influence their fuel mix” “One of the big questions now is, it is essentially a zero sum game, all the member states are building up over capacities, and we have to get rid of some of those capacities, but those who move first that do not have any support schemes… are essentially losing money in the long term” “We need a certain too for coordinating our investment and divestment schemes again, the market doesn’t seem to play this role anymore… either we leave it to the market, or we coordinate between member states their policies, but currently there is none of the two and this situation is not sustainable”

Damien Meadows is Adviser to Climate Action, European Commission At the EU Energy Law & Policy Conference, 9 February 2016, Jean-Michel Glachant, Director of the Florence School of Regulation, talks with Damien Meadows to get the perspective of the younger generation at the European Commission. “COP21 is as bigger success as is possible in the United Nations Systems” “The direction the EU is going in has been indorsed; European heads of state have committed us to a 40% domestic reduction in greenhouse emissions” “China is developing an economy wide [carbon] trading system… the Chinese system will be twice the size of Europe’s” “The carbon price here is neutral on the energy mix, while trying to bring innovation and lower emissions across all sectors”

Enrico Maria Carlini, head of Management and engineering of the electric system at the Italian power TSO, Terna Recorded 26 January 2016 in Milan at the SmartNet project kick-off meeting, in this interview by Ilaria Conti, Research and Policy Coordinator from the Florence School of Regulation, Enrico Maria Carlini talks about the evolution of the roll of TSOs and DSOs and tells us what the SmartNet project means to Terna. “The project (SmartNet) is very important for us, for the transmission operator point of view, taking into account that dispersed generation is now more or less 22 or 25% of the total energy produced in Italy” “Looking at the future of course, we have more integration between TSOs and DSOs, particularly on the real time information that we need to exchange”

Thomas-Olivier Léautier, Toulouse School of Economics, University of Toulouse Graduate School of Management, France and Fabien Roques, Compass Lexecon, University Paris Dauphine, France. While directing the Florence School of Regulation’s Executive Course to master Electricity Markets, 18-19 January 2016, in Florence, Italy, Thomas-Olivier Léautier and Fabien Roques met with reporter Nicholas Barrett to discuss the relationship between regulation and economics as well as the EU’s efforts to tackle climate change. Thomas-Olivier Léautier: “We need to reduce our carbon emissions while protecting our standard of living. Therefore, we need to, if possible, consume less electricity and produce less CO2 as we produce electricity. That requires tens of hundreds of billions of euros of investment. The more efficiently we do this… the cheaper this massive transformation is going be for society… it's super important.” Fabien Roques: “The European Commissions, even though it’s been criticised, is doing a good job e

Jonathan Stern, Head of Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Recorded in Vienna where Jonathan was co-chairing the ‘EU-Russia Energy Dialogue Gas Advisory Council’ ; and Jean-Michel Glachant (Director of the Florence School of Regulation) attending. In this interview we get a basic understanding were we (the EU) are today with gas and where we are going. “We are unsure where we are because things are changing so quickly, but the general view is that, after a decline of about 20% of demand in the EU, gas is stabilising, and will remain probably on this level for a few years unless decarbonisation towards renewables is very very successful, or the other probability is that coal will be phased out faster than we think, which means gas could improve its position a little bit, but we don’t see a very huge increase in gas demand." “The big problem that we have at the moment in Europe, and this is a new problem, is that we see domestic production beginning to going down much faster than we thought, principally bec

Xavier Labandeira, Director of FSR Climate, shares his thoughts on the outcomes of the Paris Climate Talks. “We for the first time introduce a 1.5 degree maximum increase of temperature as an aspirational environmental objective” “Once the emitters are into the agreement, which was not the case with Kyoto, they may find it easier to proceed in a way cooperatively, because leakage or competitiveness issues are minimalized” “More question marks arise from the issue of funding the huge investment flows necessary for the structural tenors that we need in order to have this decarbonisation” “Hopefully we will see many pricing devices in both the developed and developing world in the next few years” “We have a first step, a positive first step, but still much is needed, much more is needed, so we should not be too happy yet”

Simone Mori is Enel Group’s Head of European Affairs, and Head of Carbon Strategy. In this interview from Brussels just before the Paris Climate Conference, he talks with Jean-Michel Glachant, Director of the Florence School of Regulation, about his optimism for COP21. “If we should find a single parameter which drove the change up until now, it’s the dramatic drop in cost of several technologies” “Europe today is much more aligned, the Commission, the countries, the companies, there is a large consensus about the 2030 package” “This is a very wise idea, to put together top-down long-term targets to study direction, and a bottom-up, flexible menu of possible intervention to be at the disposal of national commitments but under the umbrella of multilateral agreement.”

Andris Piebalgs is Adviser to the President of Latvia and former Commissioner for Energy (Barroso I) and for Development (Barroso II) and now Senior Fellow at the Florence School of Regulation. Security of gas supply, is there enough security and is there enough supply? How important are long term contracts? An EU external energy policy? An interview by Ilaria Conti, Research and Policy Coordinator from the Florence School of Regulation Recorded 17 November 2015 “There are some security of supply issues that make this topic geopolitical, that make this topic also emotional, and because of all this complexity it is also a very interesting topic” “long term contracts… it is also security of demand, because producers need to invest a lot” “There are two challenges […] for the EU on Long Term Contracts: one is transparency”

http://florence-school.eu/event/two-day-executive-course-to-master-electricity-markets-18-19-january-2016/ Fabien Roques, Senior Vice President with the Economics Consultancy Compass Lexecon and Associate Professor at University Paris-Dauphine, talks about the demand response, which is one of the big missing parts of well-functioning electricity markets. This topic will be discussed during the 2-Day Executive Course to master Electricity Markets

Massimo Tavoni, Deputy Coordinator for Climate Change and Sustainable Development, FEEM, Italy. On the 12 November 2015 at the European University Institute in Florence, he was the discussant at the presentation of the book ‘EU Climate Policy EXPLAINED’, co-edited by Peter Vis and Jos Delbeke. This book explains the EU’s climate policies in an accessible way, to demonstrate the step-by-step approach that has been used to develop these policies, and the ways in which they have been tested and further improved in the light of experience. It shows that there is no single policy instrument that can bring down greenhouse gas emissions, but the challenge has been to put a jigsaw of policy instruments together that is coherent, delivers emissions reductions, and is cost-effective. In view of the forthcoming 2015 UN Climate Change conference in Paris, this book is of great interest for academics and policy makers alike.

Peter Vis is the EU Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford (UK), for the academic year 2014–2015. Prior to that he was Head of Cabinet to Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action (2010–2014). He has an MA (history) from the University of Cambridge (UK). On the 12 November 2015 at the European University Institute in Florence, he presented the new book ‘EU Climate Policy EXPLAINED’ which he co-edited with Jos Delbeke to Florence School of Regulation Climate and selected audience. This book explains the EU’s climate policies in an accessible way, to demonstrate the step-by-step approach that has been used to develop these policies, and the ways in which they have been tested and further improved in the light of experience. It shows that there is no single policy instrument that can bring down greenhouse gas emissions, but the challenge has been to put a jigsaw of policy instruments together that is coherent, delivers emissions reductions, and is cost-effective. In vie

Peter Vis and Massimo Tavoni answer questions from the audience after the presentation of the book ‘EU Climate Policy EXPLAINED’, co-edited by Peter Vis and Jos Delbeke. 12 November 2015, European University Institute, Florence, Italy This book explains the EU’s climate policies in an accessible way, to demonstrate the step-by-step approach that has been used to develop these policies, and the ways in which they have been tested and further improved in the light of experience. It shows that there is no single policy instrument that can bring down greenhouse gas emissions, but the challenge has been to put a jigsaw of policy instruments together that is coherent, delivers emissions reductions, and is cost-effective. In view of the forthcoming 2015 UN Climate Change conference in Paris, this book is of great interest for academics and policy makers alike.