C 184/96
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
25.5.2023
2.6.
In an increasingly digitalised energy system with decentralised generation, transmission and distribution of energy and more digitally connected devices in homes, the risk of espionage, cybercrime and hardware failure related to energy consumption is increasing.
Therefore, the Commission proposes well-coordinated cybersecurity measures to strengthen the system's overall resilience.
2.7.
The action plan outlines that this requires both medium- and long-term action, as well as a governance framework.
The Commission explains that it will involve multiple stakeholder communities, businesses and international partners and notes that limited public funding must be used wisely and more private investment is needed.
3.
General comments 3.1.
In its action plan, the Commission rightly addresses the enormous potential of digital technologies to increase the flexibility of the electricity system.
The EESC supports these objectives and welcomes most of the measures proposed in the action plan.
In particular, the EESC has already made clear the link between the energy transition and the digital transformation, pointing to the benefits of digitalisation in terms of energy savings, reduced energy intensity and better management of energy infrastructure.
However, while the action plan’s optimistic attitude is inspiring, the Commission tends to ignore the fact that the physical reality is very different from the use cases of digitalisation that are mentioned in the action plan.
3.2.
The EESC is of the opinion that the main challenges facing the energy sector are: diversifying Europe’s energy sources, reducing dependence on energy imports, securing an integrated internal energy market, improving energy efficiency, rapidly expanding the energy grid, ensuring security of supply, decarbonising the economy, reducing emissions, transitioning towards a low-carbon economy, with low-carbon and clean energy technologies, increasing and massively expanding renewable energy to meet the climate goals, promoting related research and education, ensuring a just transition and supporting the social dimension of energy, like reducing energy poverty.
Digitalising the energy system is the basis for this and can help meet all these main challenges.
3.3.
While both the strategic approach and the specific measures of the action plan point in the right direction, the Commission fails to integrate the action plan into the general energy policy.
A silo approach focusing only on digitalisation and ignoring the general framework will not generate the benefits that are rightly explained in the action plan.
3.4.
The Commission’s proposal paints a picture of an ideal state that builds on a well-developed energy system (e.g. transmission and distribution networks) and digitalises it.
However, in Europe, transmission and distribution networks must be developed first before complex digital technology can be developed.
We are digitalising in vain if intelligently managed energy cannot be transmitted through energy transmission networks.
Furthermore, a huge amount of energy is wasted on transmission and distribution networks.
Even today, the cost of green electricity that cannot be used or transmitted and that has to be curtailed amounted to more than EUR 2 billion before the energy crisis and has amounted to more than EUR 12 billion during the energy crisis in large countries like Germany.
This economic loss will increase many times over unless electricity grids and system-compatible storage capacities are expanded quickly and better ways of using electricity directly on site are found at the same time.
Digitalisation in this area can play a role in identifying these losses and using the data thus generated in network development.
3.5.
It is true that considerable investment is needed in energy infrastructure to make grids smart.
It is also true that many Member States do not incentivise such investment as their regulation shows a clear bias towards capital expenditure (CapEx), and investment in digitalisation is mainly operational expenditure (OpEx).
Coordinating and monitoring such investment and associated progress will not be enough.
The EESC calls on the European Commission to incorporate the ideas behind ‘promoting investments in digital electricity infrastructure’ into an amendment to Article 58 of Directive (EU) 2019/944 on common rules for the internal market of electricity, ensuring a regulatory framework that effectively incentivises investment in the digitalisation of electricity grids.
3.6.
The European Commission rightly points out that digital tools play an important role in developing collective self-consumption schemes and energy communities.
Both guidance and the planned experimentation platform can help, but they are not the most important aspects.
More than five years after the presentation of the Clean Energy Package, both energy communities and collective self-consumption still play a minor role in Europe's energy systems.
In many cases, the main reasons for this are significant bureaucratic barriers and a lack of information on the part of consumers and producers.
The European Commission has so far ignored the existence of these barriers.
Europeans must be given incentives