“Becoming independent of oil and gas is one of the key issues, as is once again evident with the crisis we are facing … due to the conflict in the Middle East,” said German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider on Tuesday, calling for a faster buildout of renewable energy and power grids.
On Monday, his Latvian colleague Kaspars Melnis told reporters: “If you talk about energy prices, what we can do, it’s [producing] more and more our own renewable energy.”
Lesson learned
Europe’s push for more renewables — and, in some countries, for nuclear power — draws from the lessons of the 2022 crisis.
“It’s important for me to underline that we are in a much better situation in the EU now than we were in ‘22. Why? Because we have more renewables in our system, because we’ve diversified our supply in general in our energy system, because there’s less hours where it’s gas that sets the price for electricity,” said EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen on Monday.
Von der Leyen, in Monday’s letter, noted that the share of renewables in the EU’s electricity mix has surged from 36 percent in 2021 to nearly 50 percent now.
While costly gas tends to set the overall electricity price in the EU system, the higher the share of clean electricity a country has, the lower their costs. In renewable-powered Spain, research has found, energy prices increased far less than in gas-dependent Italy.
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