All the knots come to a head. The European Union has set itself very ambitious goals towards the green transition but the States are unable to agree on which energies to consider renewable (this is the question of the so-called “taxonomy”): Germany would like to include methane (why burn it in power plants emits little CO2) while France sponsors nuclear power (because it does not emit carbon dioxide at all) but the agreement is not found and so the decision, expected for today, is officially postponed.
More concretely, the European Green Deal had established an end to state aid for the most polluting fossil fuels, and everyone agreed on this. It was also decided to include natural gas in the list of “bad guys”, but with a reserve, a source of uncertainty: the Green Deal had established that state aid for natural gas is acceptable “only if future-proof”, that is where they are necessary to accompany the energy transition, and this ambiguity has not been resolved. Germany has decided (already during Angela Merkel’s chancellorship) to close its nuclear power plants but this has increased its hunger for replacement energy on the gas front (it is waiting to receive new methane from Russia through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline) and even from coal (this year the Germans have increased their coke consumption by 30%); France, on the other hand, draws little energy from gas while it has dozens of plants nuclear power plants, has always been at the forefront in the fight against CO2 emissions, but has always assumed that the atom is “good” from this point of view, a position that few of the partners share. However, ncia is not isolated in this fight, given that Finland has recently decided to start the EPR nuclear reactor in Olkiluoto, which has a power of 1650 MegaWatts (unmatched in Europe) and alone will meet 15% of the needs. Finnish energy.
To complicate matters, the Russian state-owned company Gazprom has closed the knobs of the Yamal gas pipeline, one of the three routes used to convey methane from Russia to the EU via Poland and Germany. The stop was certified by the German network operator Gascade, after deliveries dropped to 5-6% capacity already over the weekend. Less famous than the controversial Nord Stream 2, Yamal is the smallest of the three gas pipelines that bring methane from Russia to the EU, responsible for around 10% of the supply. But the drop in volumes had an immediate impact on prices, which yesterday rose more than 20% to a record high of € 185 per MegaWatt / hour. Moscow denies that there is a connection between the closure of Yamal and Berlin’s failure to greenlight Nord Stream 2 (still under the lens of the German network regulator) but there is a suspicion that Gazprom manipulates the market on purpose. The vice president of the European Commission and EU head of competition, Margrethe Vestager, has started a check; for now in Brussels it is said that “the data collected so far are still insufficient to draw a conclusion”, but Vestager has sent the request for information to the Russian company “to understand if there are any inaccuracies”.