📋 Tender Overview
October 17 A high-level European policy meeting on "Managing risks and building resilience: Europe's energy and climate pathways", organised by the independent think tank Friends of Europe, is held in Brussels on the topic "Navigating risks and enhancing resilience: charting Europe's energy and climate pathways".
During the first session of the event, the topic "Missing parts of a resilient energy system" was discussed. The EU must limit the impact of energy shocks. Despite its declining dependence on Russia, the EU still imports almost 60% of its energy and faces new supply risks. Strengthening energy security and reducing carbon dioxide emissions more quickly will have to remain key political priorities in the EU's next institutional cycle. A resilient and well-integrated European energy system is essential to achieve the EU's key priorities. Reliable and abundant clean energy is essential for the advancement of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, for increasing the competitiveness of industry and the economy, and for achieving the 2030 and 2050 climate targets. This future combination of clean energy will largely depend on electricity. Although the share of renewable energy sources in the EU's energy mix has doubled in the last twenty years, the renewable sector is facing challenges. The solar and wind industries are affected by the volatile prices of critical raw materials, lengthy permit granting processes and a severe lack of investment in grids and electricity storage, which limits the potential of renewables in Europe.
Albinas Zananavi?ius, Deputy Minister of Energy, noted during the discussion that Lithuania is the EU leader in the development of renewable energy sources. After Russia started the war in Ukraine, Lithuania set itself the goal of completely abandoning energy imports from Russia within a month and a half, and realized this. In four years, the country's domestic generation capacity has been doubled. The regulation of accelerating and simplifying the issuance of permits for the development of renewable energy sources in Lithuania was implemented much earlier than was proposed by the European Commission.
"First of all, the import of Russian fossil fuels must be completely abandoned. This year, Russia's import trends towards the EU are showing growth, which is very worrying. Lithuania was the first to raise the issue of stopping Russian LNG imports at the beginning of this year, unfortunately, nothing has been done in the EU on this issue so far. Yes, we must continue with decarbonization, energy transition, but we also need to work on security issues," the vice minister said. For example, in Lithuania there is a requirement for solar inverters larger than 100 kW, which must be purchased from reliable states that do not pose a threat to national security.
Representatives of the European Commission, the International Energy Agency, the energy company and the climate change think tank also participated in the discussion.
