EU electricity markets are experiencing fundamental changes as a result of the EU's policy goals, especially the 2020 renewables (RES) targets. With a growing share of RES, flexible and back-up generation are facing lower running hours and declining profitability, which puts at risk investments in this type of generation needed to cope with RES intermittency.
In a number of EU member states, these developments led to growing concerns among policy makers about the future prospects of ensuring generation adequacy. As a result, capacity remuneration mechanisms, including strategic reserves, are now becoming a de-facto reality in many of these markets.
EURELECTRIC strongly believes that investments in Europe should be driven by more market, underpinned by a regional approach to assessing generation adequacy and a coordinated development of CRMs.
This EURELECTRIC's conference was devoted to this topic, one of the most hotly debated areas in the industry at the moment. This event represented an opportunity to exchange views between the electricity industry, policymakers and other stakeholders on how the electricity market design could be adapted to cope with growing RES, what are the key areas for coordination between different markets introducing CRM and what policy tools the European Commission has at hand to lead this process.