It is the worst-kept secret in Brussels: the Polish Council presidency is working on uniting all 27 EU countries behind Warsaw’s goal to change the way Europe thinks about energy security by June.
“In Poland we always had a knack for speaking about energy security, and we have been banging on about it forever,” said Krzysztof Bolesta, deputy energy minister, in Brussels today, and change was necessary because “our notion of energy is still stuck in the 20th century.”
In the 1970s, oil supply shocks prompted rich countries create the International Energy Agency (IEA) to avoid future fossil fuel shortages before the EU discovered renewables in the late 1990s to slash imports and Europe solidified gas ties to Russia.
But old certainties are gone. “The energy world has dramatically evolved compared to when the last energy security strategy was set up more than a decade ago,” said Georg Zachmann of Brussels-based think-tank Bruegel.
The Poles say five priorities should shape the new approach: protection, independence, sustainability, affordability and togetherness.
That means: protecting infrastructure physically and digitally while learning to “better deal with misinformation that is hampering policymaking efforts,” said Bolesta. At the same time, Europe “must strive to limit, to the extent possible, all energy imports,” while also considering technology, software and “maybe even ownership structures” of key infrastructure.
Green power is more resilient to attacks – as Russia’s devastating attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid show – and can “mitigate energy prices,” the Polish politician added, stressing that reducing the energy price of the transition is just as crucial.
Last: “More Europe in certain aspects of energy policy very much makes sense, and we should make sure that the new Energy Union concept is enforced even better.”
Zachmann, who co-authored a report on energy security released today, says exchanging energy across EU countries kept prices down during the last crisis.
Brussels “should not only institutionalise the ad-hoc solutions to coordinate system operation under stress but also find ways to better coordinate investments for energy security,” he explained.