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31 January 2008 - The European Commission's energy chief said he welcomed an alternative proposal from eight EU countries, led by Germany and France, to its radical plan for breaking up Europe's big gas and electricity companies.
Eight countries - Germany, France, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Luxembourg, Latvia and Slovakia - proposed a full functional separation of supply activities from network operations with strong national regulation, but without splitting ownership of the utilities' infrastructure, as the Commission had proposed.
"I saw it as a very positive sign because all 27 countries now are clearly moving towards agreeing on an internal market in energy," EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs told a Brussels conference of the French Institute of International Relations, Reuters reports.
Piebalgs stressed the European Union executive was not abandoning its proposal for full "ownership unbundling" but said it was important that France and Germany were seeking a solution and not just rejecting the Commission plan.
Control of gas pipelines and electricity grids was crucial to increasing competition and encouraging new suppliers to enter the European energy market, he said, citing the shortage of interconnections between Spain and France as an example of the opposite.
"If the market is very much controlled by one company, then you never have competition and new supplies coming in," he said. "It's very clear that network companies are crucial."
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