European Energy Handbook 2023-2024

This year's edition focuses on recent legal and commercial developments within these jurisdictions and covers issues such as the REPower EU strategy, which, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU introduced with the aim of reducing the EU's dependence on Russian fossil fuels. This edition also covers other developments in EU energy policy and strategy, such as the EU's adoption of the European Green Deal, a package of concrete policy initiatives aimed at achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions in the EU by 2050, Fit for 55, which is a set of proposals revising and updating EU legislation that aims to ensure the EU reaches its intermediate targets for 2030, and the revision of the design of the EU electricity market.

Climate change, the energy transition and associated challenges continue to be strong themes in nearly all the contributions of this edition – as each jurisdiction strives to meet its EU renewable energy obligations by 2030 and beyond. Other topics in this edition include the ever increasing importance for the role of electricity storage in the energy mix, the more evident progress of privatisations in some jurisdictions, the development and construction of new electricity interconnectors and the emergence of multi-purpose interconnectors to enable the multi-jurisdictional connections of offshore wind projects, the growth in investment in alternative renewable sources such as hydrogen, and the ever increasing importance in the consideration of environmental, social and governance obligations in the energy world.