EU's Energy Director Shares Relevance of Renewables

Editor's Note:

Energy has always been an important aspect of governments' policies in the international spectrum and has never stopped influencing the livelihood of the people. The Global Times (GT) talked with Megan Richards (Richards), director, Directorate-General for Energy, European Commission, who discussed the petrodollar system, EU's special purpose vehicle (SPV) towards Iranian oil and China's renewable energy collaboration with the EU.

GT: According to the International Energy Agency's report for 2018, in the development of various renewable energy sources, solar energy will continue to lead the global growth of renewable energy generation in the next five years. China is the leader in solar power, with almost 40 percent of the world's installed solar capacity by 2023, ahead of the US and India. How will the EU and China work together in further collaborations in solar energy?

Richards: We have a number of areas where we will work together. First, is research and technological innovation which is a very interesting area because China, as you said, has a huge installed capacity and we are both leaders in renewable energy. Also, Europe focuses not only on solar energy, but wind and geothermal energy as well.

Another area where we have huge potential for further collaboration is in the development of related regulatory framework. So, it's one thing to generate the renewable energy and it's another thing to integrate it and this is one of the challenges of renewable energy.

We have changed our regulatory framework in Europe, introduced new legislation that makes it much easier to integrate renewables into the grid, increased the importance and ability of digitalization, made that integration easier and better, increased decentralization of the generation of solar power and put consumers in a stronger position to be able to generate their renewable energy and also feed it back into the grid and use demand response to take energy from the grid when prices are low.

This is market-based and legislature-based that allows better integration of renewables and this is an area where we work very closely with China to try to use some of those principles that we have seen to be important in European legislation in China to help balance and make sure that integration works better.