True electricity market integration requires environmental compliance

Before the EU’s CBAM definitive regime began on 1 January this year, many stakeholders questioned whether CBAM should be delayed in the electricity sector. Some even questioned whether electricity should even remain included at all. After all, the Energy Community Treaty has for 20 years promoted integration of the Western Balkans’ energy markets with those of the EU, rather than adding new barriers. 

Although CBAM is likely impacting this process to some extent – it’s too early to tell how much – much of the debate currently focuses on its negative impacts, without acknowledging the positive potential of CBAM to drive forward alignment with EU energy and climate policy. The right of Western Balkan renewable energy producers to export electricity to the EU unhindered is also often taken as a given in the debate.  

Our new position paper, signed by 63 civil society organisations, therefore seeks to highlight another side of the story: that electricity market integration is desirable, but it must go hand in hand with environmental and climate compliance in the electricity sector.

Not playing by the rules

The Western Balkans’ deadly coal power plants are notorious, but it’s not merely a question of fossil fuels versus renewables, but also a wider lack of environmental governance. Despite being a biodiversity hotspot, the countries fail to properly protect their valuable natural areas, and to properly apply basic EU safeguards like strategic and project-level environmental impact assessments. Appropriate assessments under the Habitats Directive and water impact tests under the Water Framework Directive are barely applied at all.

Western Balkan governments want to participate in the EU energy markets without playing by the rules, and this isn’t fair to their people, nature or others who do play by the rules.

The Energy Community Treaty was designed to avoid this situation. And while it has contributed significantly to moving forward the Western Balkan countries’ legislative alignment with the EU, its environmental safeguards are lagging behind. It also lacks financial penalties, allowing its Contracting Parties to procrastinate for years on compliance. 

Finally, deadlines with consequences

CBAM has therefore been a breath of fresh air, finally providing clear deadlines for the countries to either face its consequences or gain exemptions for electricity by applying EU energy and climate law, including emissions trading schemes equivalent to that of the EU by 1 January 2030.

Progress has been slow, but Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova have transposed the legislation needed for electricity market coupling – the first precondition for exemption from CBAM. Montenegro has also recently committed to carbon neutrality by 2050. 

The EU must therefore not give up on CBAM in electricity, but rather use it to the maximum to help move forward compliance with EU energy and climate policy. More broadly, the European Commission must make sure the exporting countries finally comply with all the relevant EU rules, including environmental safeguards.

The way forward

Western Balkan governments may not realise it yet, but the Commission would be doing both the EU and the region a favour by applying the CBAM exemption criteria and reductions in CBAM charges strictly. Insisting that the countries meaningfully advance on decarbonisation in order to gain CBAM exemptions for electricity will help to make up for the lack of enforcement mechanisms in the Energy Community Treaty, and introducing carbon pricing would help them mobilise resources to fund a just energy transition. 

More broadly, the Commission also needs to apply joined-up thinking. Access to EU funds for energy must be conditioned on enforcement of the Energy Community Treaty, and full transposition and enforcement of nature and water protection safeguards in the countries, to improve renewable energy sustainability.

The EU also needs to avoid creating uncertainty about its own policy directions. Recent calls by Italy’s government and others to suspend the ETS are totally irresponsible. They largely result from countries’ own misguided investments in gas, and would increase the EU’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, and vulnerability to price shocks like the current one.

Although the Western Balkan countries need to mobilise their own resources for just transition via carbon pricing, the EU also needs to show it is serious about supporting a just transition in the region by earmarking financial support for carbon-intensive regions in the next EU long-term budget. Only this way can we ensure a level playing field in the electricity sector and a more socially and environmentally sustainable energy transition.