The Diplomat
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, assured yesterday that the energy transition will be one of the priorities of the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council because, he warned, postponing this challenge while waiting for the energy crisis caused by the war to be overcome “would be a tremendous mistake”.
“The conflict in Ukraine, if anything, reminds us of the extent to which renewable energies are a factor of global stability and how energies linked to fossil fuels are a factor of global instability,” said Sánchez during the opening of the International Conference on Renewable Energy (SPIREC 23), co-organized by Spain together with the international organization Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) and which is being held at the IFEMA site in Madrid until February 23.
“Eight out of every ten inhabitants of the planet live in countries that are net energy importers,” continued the head of the Executive during the event, which was attended by the third vice president and minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera; the European Commissioner for Energy, Kadri Simson; the Minister of Energy of the Netherlands, Rob Jetten; the Minister of Energy of Romania, Virgil Daniel Popescu; and the president of REN21, Arthouros Zervos.
Therefore, he warned, it is necessary to move towards “an energy transition that must be just, based on renewable energies and their immense transformative potential” because, “in a context like this, creating a new energy framework means moving towards a world order that is inevitably much more just, defined by an open strategic autonomy and also avoiding scenarios of energy blackmail, so common in the history of humanity, which is precisely what we have also experienced during this long year of war in Ukraine”.
“In the face of the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, some argue that we should postpone the energy transition until we overcome the current emergency,” stated Pedro Sánchez. Faced with this “tremendous mistake”, and faced with the “merchants of doubt” who use this argument “as an excuse for nothing to change”, the Spanish proposal “is exactly the opposite, it is to move forward with more determination than ever in this green transition”, declared Pedro Sánchez.
Spain is in favor of “taking advantage of this geopolitically complex situation we are experiencing as an incentive to go further and faster in this green transition”, he assured. For this reason, “we are going to promote this vision from the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union starting next July, defining the energy transition as a real priority on the agenda of the Spanish Presidency, as it is for the European Union as a whole,” he added.
According to Sánchez, Spanish companies are already top-level benchmarks in the field of ecological transition and, thanks to the approval of the Climate Change and Energy Transition Law, the Integrated National Energy and Climate Plan or the Long-Term Decarbonization Strategy, renewable energies represented in 2022 “42% of the energy generated in our country”. “All this explains why Spain has been able to face the energy crisis generated by this war much better than other European partners, more dependent, unfortunately, on fossil fuels, and, in particular, those of Russian origin,” he assured. Likewise, this situation “helps to understand the success of the so-called Iberian solution, a reference in the European debate to reform the electricity market”, he said.
