The European Commission's Executive Vice-President for a Europe fit for the Digital Age and Commissioner for Competition, Ms. Margrethe Vestager, warned this Thursday at the Forum Europa in Brussels that the EU needs more electricity interconnections to avoid losing the excess electricity production that is sometimes generated in Spain thanks to renewable plants.
At this event organised by the New Economy Forum in the EU capital, Vestager stressed the importance of the European Union developing single electricity and telecommunications markets.
In this respect, the Vice-President recalled that on occasions "prices in Spain are negative due to all the renewable capacity that cannot leave", something that would not happen if "we had a single market".
In the same vein, she called for "a single market for telecommunications companies". "It will not be easy to achieve, but it would be very good for citizens," Vestager said.
Accordingly, she identified supporting the development of these wider markets as one of the priorities for the new Commission that will take office in the coming months. "We have to make sure that we focus on that," she added
In fact, she warned that "national markets are restricting the ability of companies to grow because transaction costs are incurred when they want to enter another market".
"Applying single market rules is a great ally of competition," she concluded, noting that large European companies have documented more than a hundred barriers to the single market.
