According to an as yet unpublished EU Impact Assessment document seen by
The Guardian newspaper, wind farms and solar-power facilities could lose their priority over other energy sources on Europe’s electricity grids, and this could result in carbon emissions increasing by 10%.
The ‘priority dispatch’ system is supposed to be mandatory under current EU rules, but the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands do not comply with it.
Oliver Joy, a spokesman for the WindEurope (
windeurope.org) trade association, believes that priority dispatch for ‘clean’ energy will be removed from the EU’s Renewable-Energy Directive, which is currently being redrafted.
He said: “Scrapping priority dispatch for renewable energies would be detrimental to the wind sector, and it seems to be at odds with Europe’s plans to de-carbonise and to increase renewables penetration over the next decade.
“Investors took priority dispatch into account when projecting the revenues in their original investment decisions.”