Teresa Ribera and the Portuguese Minister of the Environment meet to evaluate this initiative that will expire on May 31 after one year of application.
The Government of Spain sees the European Commission as “receptive” to its request to extend the so-called “Iberian exception”, which establishes a cap on the gas used to generate electricity and which expires on May 31 after one year of application from the first sight good from Brussels, according to diplomatic sources.
Meeting of The Vice President
The Vice President of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, and the Portuguese Minister of Environment and Climate Action, Duarte Cordeiro, met this Wednesday with the Vice President of the Community Executive responsible for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, at the institution’s headquarters in Brussels to discuss the extension that both countries claim.
The Government already announced last week its intention to ask the European Commission for an extension of the Iberian mechanism so that it can be applied beyond May and while the energy crisis lasts, even until the end of 2024.
Ribera then explained that Spain wants this cap on the price of gas for electricity generation to be “as low as possible”, between 45 and 50 euros per megawatt/hour (MWh), although according to its design it will increase from 40 euros with the that started up to 70 euros that it will reach in June.
Thus, today’s meeting was “positive” and served to evaluate how the mechanism has worked so far, explained the same sources, who described the attitude of Brussels as “receptive” to the idea and specified that “the price has not been decided”. which would be fixed in a possible prolongation of the Iberian exception.
“Vice President Vestager has welcomed the presentations from Spain and Portugal positively,” the sources added, adding that “no specific deadline or date has been set at the meeting for the technical teams to complete their analysis.”
The Portuguese delegation also described the three-way appointment as “positive” and, along these lines, all the parties involved decided that their technical teams should now work on the details of the extension ahead of a new meeting between the two representatives of Spain and the community vice president in the future.
A spokeswoman for the Community Executive explained that at the meeting on Wednesday “they discussed issues within the Competition portfolio, particularly in relation to the energy market”, but she declined to make specific comments on an extension of the Iberian mechanism.
In this sense, he recalled that the European Commission gave its approval to the measure at the beginning of June 2022, which it then evaluated at 8,300 million euros, considering that it was “justified” by the “particular circumstances” of the Iberian electricity market. and, in particular, due to the “limited interconnection capacity” of the peninsula with the rest of the continent and the “high” exposure of consumers to a wholesale market “very influenced” by the price of gas.
This article is originally published on latribunadeguadalajara.es
