The Energy World is Flat: Opportunities from the End of Peak Oil

APPENDIX

For A Competitive European Energy Policy

“Industry will gradually lose its competitiveness if this course of increasing subsidies is not reversed soon”,

Kurt Bock, CEO of BASF

Europe, like the US, needs to exit the crisis through competitiveness and security of supply.

Europe must change an energy policy that has forgotten companies and households with the objective of being “the greenest of the class” without paying attention to costs and competitiveness.

European companies and families cannot continue to bear the costs of planning mistakes and subsidy generosity, because the situation is dramatic.

In Europe, electricity costs are, on average, 50% higher than in the USA, the costs of industrial gas are almost 75% higher. This is the difference between an energy policy that promotes efficiency and replacement through low costs, and Europe's policy of promoting forced substitution through subsidies.

European companies are among the ones paying the highest prices for electricity and gas in the OECD.

The “green” policies and the development of renewables have allowed wholesale electricity prices to fall; while at the same time, with the addition of fixed costs and subsidies, consumer prices have skyrocketed. This is an error that destroys jobs and business and needs to be tackled urgently.

The European Union is responsible less than 14% of CO₂ emissions in the world, but 100% of the cost. Interestingly, despite the green policies of the EU, the United States, since 2005, ...