Brussels proposes a new “roadmap” to contain the price of gas

The Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, stressed that the president of the EC, Ursula von der Leyen, has pronounced this Wednesday in favor of a maximum price for gas and to decouple it from the electricity market.

Ribera, in a video, has underlined the “courage” and commitment of Von der Leyen, “in line with what we have been manifesting in Spain for a long time.”

He added that Europe should not tolerate the “speculative behavior that we have been seeing in the prices of gas that we import in European markets.”

According to Ribera, “it is important to make clear how much we are willing to pay, introducing references on maximum price and modifying what until now has been the most important indicator for any company that activates its contracts, its sales, in the field of energy linked to gas”, such as the TTF index of the Dutch market, a reference in Europe.

Ribera also stressed that Von der Leyen has also spoken out about the need to separate the price of natural gas from that of electricity, without which “it is very difficult to avoid this constant tension in prices that we are seeing”.

He recalled that the so-called “Iberian mechanism”, which has been applied in Spain and Portugal since June and which puts a cap on gas for electricity generation in the wholesale markets of those countries, “has contributed enormously” to the reduction of prices.

The minister said that without the mechanism, wholesale electricity prices would have continued to grow in Spain, as has happened in France, Germany and other countries, which “today consider the generalization of the solution we apply in Spain and Portugal.”

He pointed out that Europe must say, in a united way, how much is the maximum that it is willing to pay for the gas that arrives in its territory and modify “in an extraordinary way” the functioning of the wholesale electricity market “so that it is not so perverted by that price of gas out of context and enormously high. ”

He added that Europe and Spain must protect their families and their industrial fabric, while pointing out that “it does not make sense that the cost differential of the energy products of European families or the productive fabric in Europe is so far from the energy cost of the rest of the countries of the world”.

Source: What’s Going on