October 18th, 2012 by Andrew McKillop, Former Expert-Policy & Programming, DG XVII Energy, European Commission
What crisis? Nymex and ICE oil price movement shows how oil prices can be moved anywhere as long as its up, except of course when its down, where fundamentals point with stubborn determination.Recent weeks, especially the last show that sometimes the oil bulls can get dispirited and run out of news support, and be forced to take a cut in their boundless optimism which says we really can have $130 a barrel for Brent and $125 for WTI like Goldman Sachs tells us we can – this year, in 2012. When the markets take an especially hard hit, like the recent loss of $10 off the barrel price, the dead cat bounce can take the shape of a Goldman tiger bounce – paper tiger of course.
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Posted in Oil | No Comments »
October 12th, 2012 by Dominique Finon, CNRS Paris
Harmonisation in matter of capacity adequacy is not on the 2014 agenda of electricity markets integration. But the Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER), the European Commission and different European bodies of stakeholders have engaged reflections on this issue. A guideline of good practices on generation adequacy and capacity remuneration mechanisms initiated by the CEER is currently in discussion. The DG Energy is partly focusing the redaction of its next October Internal market communication on capacity remuneration mechanisms. Free trading and cross-border contracting on capacity rights are on the top of the list. Continue reading »
Posted in Electricity, Energy Policy | 1 Comment »
October 4th, 2012 by Ignacio Perez-Arriaga, Comillas University
Biofuels are a key component of the EU strategy to improve the efficiency in transport, one of the sectors with a larger energy use and carbon emissions in Europe, and for which the European Commission has set very ambitious reduction objectives Continue reading »
Posted in Climate Change, Energy Policy, Gas | No Comments »
October 1st, 2012 by Georg Zachmann, Research Fellow, Bruegel
Market coupling is one of the key-policies for achieving the EU single electricity market. The EU Commission praises the price-lowering effects of market integration in the first draft of the Internal Market Communication of August 30th: “wholesale electricity prices in the EU have risen much less thanks to competition facilitated by increasing cross-border trading and market integration”. Continue reading »
Posted in Electricity, Energy Policy | 4 Comments »
