Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the International Conference for Renewable Energies is to be held in Bonn at the beginning of June. The German Federal Chancellor had announced this conference at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. I regard this conference as a truly important result of this summit, as you yourself, Commissioner, have just said. I do think that it was particularly those who had been in Johannesburg who were extremely disappointed by what came out of it with regard to renewable energies. Even if, as you just said, we can now welcome the Johannesburg coalition’s first successes, it had not been possible to achieve the goals we had set ourselves there at the time, even though the European Union really did make very serious and very concerted efforts. As I see it, this makes it extraordinarily important that this conference in Bonn should be a success. You referred, Commissioner, to the European preparatory conference in Berlin, which was held in January, attended by over 650 participants from 45 countries, and made its expectations very clear – not only as regards what it expected of the Bonn conference, but also of the European Union and its policies. I think the way in which the European Union has conceived its strategy for the development of renewable energies has been positively exemplary, envisaging the doubling of the share of energy production from renewable sources to 12% – in the case of the electricity sector to 22.1% – by 2010. You mentioned our market penetration campaign and our legislation to promote electricity and biofuels. It is important to note that we are currently engaged in using the eco-design directive and energy services to build up efficiency, but what is now vital is that we press on with this strategy and step it up. I do not actually need to remind you what this is about – the climate change problem, finite resources, the need to reduce our dependence on imports, the creation of jobs in this area. I think it is, in the first place, important that we should look beyond 2010 and – although this is where I disagree with you, Commissioner – to set ourselves a new objective. The fact is that the Berlin conference did not merely call for a study; it also made it quite plain in its concluding resolutions that 20% was a desirable target for 2020, and you can see that our compromise resolution expects no less than that, namely that the Commission and the Council should have that as their goal and that policies should be framed with it in mind. What will in future be important in terms of a more intensive approach will be the devising of new measures to this end. Although you have expressed doubts about this, we can see that it is, under certain circumstances, possible to achieve the 22.1% we have set ourselves in the electricity sector; we learn this in particular from the countries with a system of central dispatch. It is impossible, or almost impossible, to achieve this in heating and refrigeration, so this is where it will be important to add to EU lawmaking if the overall target of doubling is to be achieved, but also to integrate renewable energies in many of the European Union’s other policy areas, such as structural policy, regional policy, perhaps in the Mediterranean and certainly in development cooperation. We know that three billion people around the world are obliged to live without access to electricity, and it is quite crucial in terms of the poverty reduction that we should back something that offers real opportunities of doing this, that being decentralised systems using renewable energies. It is for that reason that our resolution makes it very clear that it is necessary to provide for the appropriate measures, and that means that institutions providing funding – such as, among others, the European Investment Bank – must give priority to renewable energies and to energy efficiency.

Political group: PSE