Reuters Summit-Europe must act to avert power crisis-IEA
05 Jun 2007 16:15:39 GMT Source: Reuters
(For other news from the Reuters Global Energy Summit, click on http://www.reuters.com/summit/GlobalEnergy07?pid=500) By Vera Eckert LONDON, June 5 (Reuters) - Europe will face more power cuts unless it speeds up the building of new plants, including nuclear power stations, and enables electricity to flow across borders, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday. William Ramsay, Deputy Executive Director of the IEA, called for more government clarity to encourage early investment decisions and more effective use of available capacity. "There is not a capacity problem in aggregate," he told the Reuters Global Energy Summit. But he said power outages were happening and could have knock-on effects because spare supplies were not being transferred across borders. "Bottlenecks will become increasingly problematic and will need to be fixed," Ramsay said in a video link to the Reuters summit. He alluded to a November 2003 outage in Germany which plunged millions of homes into darkness for hours and caused smaller outages as far afield as Morocco. Italy was also hit by a spectacular outage in September 2003 as frail lines from France and Switzerland were devastated by storms. For future power supplies, Ramsay said nuclear energy would need to play a wider role. So far in Europe, there has been little action. "There is a lot of talk, but not too many orders," said Ramsay of Europe, where only Finland has concrete plans for a new reactor. He especially questioned Germany's decision to go without nuclear from the early 2020s, saying this restricted the country to either coal burning or increased dependence on Russian gas. Apart from heightened political tensions between Russia and the West, Ramsay voiced concern the country's gas monopoly Gazprom <GAZP.MM> was investing too much in media ventures, for instance, and not enough in energy infrastructure. "Gazprom is not investing in upstream, it is investing in everything else," he said. But Ramsay said the challenge of facing up to Russia should not distract the European Union from its efforts to break up energy giants in favour of a more open, liberalised market. "Europe must behave more like a commercial player," he said.
