“We have introduced a common storage policy in three months, thanks to the work of this Committee and its rapporteur, Professor Buzek. This has worked well. We filled storage up to 95 percent by November last year. And today, we have still around 57 percent in our inventories. This is more than twice the level of underground storage last year,” she said.
Simson noted that the EU has initiated a framework for a coordinated gas demand reduction.
“All Member States committed to reduce their consumption by at least 15 percent. And they did so. Demand dropped by more than 19 percent between August and January 2023. This helped us save 42 bcm of gas,” the Commissioner explained.
Among further steps, Simson highlighted the Energy Platform to support diversification and joint purchasing, a mechanism to correct price peaks in the TTF gas market not justified by the fundamentals of global markets.
The Commissioner pointed out that all those steps didn’t undermine Europe’s green energy transition, as it managed to reduce carbon emissions by 2.5 percent in 2022.
“An important part of REPowerEU was to boost renewables deployment to replace gas in power generation and heating. This has matched expectations and possibly exceeded them. Last year, we generated more electricity from wind and solar than from gas. 2022 was a record year for solar energy in the EU, with 41 GW of new capacity installed. Wind capacity also rose by 15 GW. Last year, 39 percent of our electricity came from renewables,” Simson added.
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