Trialog: The governance of the European energy union – between national energy strategies and the Paris Agreement

Trialog: The governance of the European energy union – between national energy strategies and the Paris Agreement

With the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement, two important international sustainability and climate protection agreements were agreed to in 2015. Their core objectives are to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees and to make the world greenhouse gas neutral in the second half of this century.

Germany and the European Union have ratified these targets. In order to achieve them, the European energy supply needs to be reorganized. However, conflicts within the European Union and between individual Member States can make implementation more difficult, for example, if some EU countries continue to rely on fossil fuels for the long term. Does the European Union have sufficient energy policy competences to control the conversion process and to achieve climate protection targets? Are the instruments and procedures foreseen in the “Clean Energy for All Europeans” package suitable and how can the tasks be properly distributed within the EU?

These questions are being researched by the new working group of the “Energy Systems of the Future” project (ESYS). In the trialog “The governance of the European Energy Union – between national energy strategies and the Paris Agreement” on the 13th of July 2017 at the Allianz Forum in Berlin, the ESYS experts exchange ideas with representatives from politics, business and civil society.