EUGINE Quarterly Newsletter
17 November 2022
Reforming Electricity Markets – What for?
The European Commission work programme for 2023, published last month, announced a reform of the EU electricity market in early 2023, with a focus on decoupling gas and electricity prices for consumers. Decoupling wholesale spot markets and retail markets could help protect consumers from strong price variations — but splitting or breaking up the current market structure would not cut it.
In the long term, we will need to ask ourselves whether we only want “cheap” energy or whether we also want it to be reliable. Together with our sister association EUTurbines, we have started looking at how a market design that delivers both green and reliable energy would look like. Spoiler alert: it does not require deconstructing European markets.
Electricity Revenue Caps Risk Curbing Investments in Biogas
Regulation 2022/1854 on an emergency intervention to address high energy prices entered into force at the beginning of October. Shortly before, we published our assessment of the draft text. In it, we called for combined-heat-and-power (CHP) running on biogas to be excluded. The final text goes a bit in that direction, although all will depend on how the measures are implemented at national level.
The emergency measures are limited in time, but the exact impact of the revenue caps on investments , will maybe only be seen in some years.
Gas Package Key to Enable Hydrogen Power
If anything, the current crisis has shown us the interdependence between the gas and electricity systems. As we phase out Russian gas and decarbonise our system, the share of gas power will reduce. Nevertheless, plants running on hydrogen and renewable gas will still be essential to provide flexibility to the system.
Two essential points to make hydrogen power plants a reality are to include them in network planning and to ensure regular information exchange on the hydrogen-readiness of networks and large end-users. For that, a definition of hydrogen-readiness will be needed.
Largest Data Centre in Romania will run on H2-Ready Engines
This innovative project was presented by a representative of the data centre company Cluster Power during the European Net Zero Alliance (ENZA) event on “Integrated solutions to deliver a net-zero energy system”.
The hydrogen ready plant will supply energy to Cluster Power’s infrastructures and buildings, and will be able to run on a 25% share of hydrogen. Moreover, the trigeneration system will also cool down the temperature needed for the data center by cooling the heat produced.
Go deeper here.
Engine Power Plants and Heat Pumps – the perfect combination
Denmark has set itself the ambitious goal of replacing 75% of its gas consumption by biogas in 2030. At the household level, the most efficient way to make use of this renewable gas is by installing a cogeneration plant together with a heat pump. This allows to save half of the gas while also making households independent of electricity price fluctuations. Learn more about the concept on the website of our member EC Power.
