Abstract
The European Union has produced hundreds of laws in the field of electricity policy in the last three decades, on issues ranging from nuclear disposal to renewable energy generation support. Is the EU electricity policy of the last 30 years balanced, according to the classical energy trilemma framework? An all-inclusive, quantitative, multi-decade examination of the EU energy policy is still lacking. Besides the traditional policy perspectives, policy density and intensity, this paper proposes a novel method to measure policy outcomes: policy importance. The results show that EU energy legislation is indeed imbalanced. Environmental concerns rank first among EU electricity policy priorities; however, since 2003, the creation of an internal market has started to challenge environment as the top priority. Furthermore, internal market policies tend to have a higher trend of adoption than environment. Security of supply is at the bottom of EU policymakers' attention. The EU energy policy is becoming more intricate, but not more revolutionary. Meaningful policy changes occur at a stagnating yearly rate, despite the increasing power of the EU institutions.Keywords: electricity policy; quantitative; policy density; policy intensity; European UnionJEL Classifications: F530, Q480DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijeep.11461
Highlights
In any given work day, the Official Journal of the European Union publishes at least one piece of legislation related to energy
Using the World Energy Council (World Energy Council, 2020) framework of a classical energy trilemma between the competing energy priorities of affordability, security of supply and environmental sustainability, this article aims to shed a light over the existence or not of such balance in the European energy policy
There are several attempts to analyse this equilibrium between policy priorities, but comprehensive, decades-long, quantitative studies are missing
Summary
In any given work day, the Official Journal of the European Union publishes at least one piece of legislation related to energy. Using the World Energy Council (World Energy Council, 2020) framework of a classical energy trilemma between the competing energy priorities of affordability, security of supply and environmental sustainability, this article aims to shed a light over the existence or not of such balance in the European energy policy. There are several attempts to analyse this equilibrium between policy priorities, but comprehensive, decades-long, quantitative studies are missing. A long-term analysis of the legislative output in the EU energy sector, probing for policy patterns, concludes that neither incremental progress nor punctuated equilibrium satisfactorily explains the patterns of EU policy-making, stopping short of giving a verdict on policy balance (Benson and Russel, 2015). The balance between climate change and the internal energy market policies is investigated, and the conclusion is that both will fail, unless refocused (Helm, 2014)
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