 I'm very happy to be able to be here right at this point in time and maybe, you know, from this slightly more technical or slightly more on the ground experiences of a policy officer in the European Commission and the Secretary General to talk about what this energy union project means and what we are trying to achieve with that and how that fits in with the political priorities of the Commission. And then I just draw something here I was reading through this latest and quite getting quite some purchase booked by the IIA talking about the consequences of Brexit and everything through that which said well actually there's even if we are talking about a half out or half in approach energy is one of the areas where it is going to be likely to be cooperation with UK and for UK involvement and then maybe this sort of links to some of the areas that we're going to be discussing about regional cooperation management of the system in a regional level and benefiting as part of a wider European approach. First of all for where am I in the normal things? Helen mentioned that I work in the Secretary General. Now those of you who are sensible have no interest in the internal politics of the Commission. Nonetheless I'm going to indulge just for a moment on what that means and why it's important. One of the things that you could say that's happening inside the Commission is there's a sense that there's a strong need to ensure that the coherence and the coordination of policies done at a more stronger level in a more current way from the beginning. So we have what might be called ex-ante coordination instead of ex-post-coordination. On one level this is seen by the appointment of Vice Presidents whose job was not to manage individual Director General Ministries but rather to act as Deputy Tishi or act as Deputy Prime Ministers would to coordinate the work on specific policy areas, bringing together the work of different Directorates General and different Commissioners more to the point. To stop having a sense that policy was unconnected with each other and to ensure that from the very beginning policies were conceived in a joined up way. And which policies were to be particularly important in this, especially now as we have a Vice President who's clearly making sure that we don't have extraneous policies in Vice President Timmermans, of course Vice President Timmermans, well they were to be reflecting the political priorities set by President Junker when he was candidate Junker and when he was appointed by when he was nominated by the Council and later upon and set out in his political program to the Parliament. And of those 10 political priorities one of them was very clearly energy and that's not an accident. It's because in searching and looking up where areas that Europe could do better, looking forward, so I could say even do even better, one of the clearest areas was energy talking to stakeholders, politicians, policymakers across Europe. This is already clear. These are senses that were already clear, which is not a sense of having we had a disaster for the last five years and we need to improve it. It's like this is one of the areas where we are hitting huge challenges, some of them challenges of success and we have to ensure that we bring a coherence to energy policy and to climate policy that cuts across the entire policy making of the DG. And that's why energy union was one of the first political deliveries of this commission. I think the second after the investment fund, after the Junker fund. So what is our vision of an energy union? I actually think this is something that's very useful to look at when you're reading the document. Start off at the beginning and see what is the vision it's delivering, that it aims to deliver. Let's judge some of the successes based on that. Are we able to do it? Well, the vision is of a energy with solidarity, energy security based on solidarity and trust, that we can trust each other to deliver our aims and that we can act in solidarity with each other in terms of ensuring security supply, ensuring that we meet our aim. And that we speak of one voice in global affairs. I'll come back to each one of these later. Second point is that we have an integrated continent-wide European system that we don't think in terms of the systems as being broken up into national systems. That these borders are not how we manage the system but we see them as operating as one with energy flows across those systems. We have a sustainable low carbon and climate friendly economy which means that we have renewables, that we have more energy efficiency, that we have an integrated energy and climate policy and integrated low carbon policy, integrating renewables with the wider part of it. We have the idea of strong and innovative competitive European economy and here's one of the sections because we're talking about the pillars, the dimensions of the energy union strategy. One of the dimensions is research and innovation, which I think is going to be something that both is going to be the hardest level of work because it's really trying to bring things together that haven't worked necessarily all that well and really will show the benefits of the new approach in terms of how we deliver the energy strategy through innovative new companies in the future, linking the developments in information and computer technology through the requirements of energy efficiency, through to the integration of renewables into the wider linking of the retail market to the wholesale market and which companies are going to do this and how they're going to do it and as an aside I would say this is also something where Ireland potentially has huge potential to benefit with a strong ICT sector and very strong requirements in terms of managing the integration of renewables within the system and finally the idea that citizens should be able to take ownership of the energy transition. It's the vision, it's set out at the very beginning of the document and we see exactly where we are most successful or not over the next years. If you want to see what that program translates into and I'll come back to that at the end, there's action points and more to the point a roadmap of specific proposals that are set out how to deliver the vision. The meeting between in the sandwich, that is setting out in more detail what that means and how it's going to be done and why we think certain things, but I think if you just start off with those two documents, the beginning and the end of this presentation, maybe you could all go home and you wouldn't have to put up with listening to it. Energy security is based on solidarity and trust. What kind of concrete actions are we delivering here? Well, last year it's very clear, I'm actually far longer than that, that we've had challenges coming from our dependence on a single supplier in many member states. What we need to do is to have a resilient and diverse supply of gas into Europe. We have to be sure of our security of gas supply, take into account the lessons that we learned from last year's stress tests, work towards practical implementation of our energy security strategy. Right now in the commission, we are looking at developing proposals on a new updated gas security supply regulation, which will make concrete some of the recommendations, the lessons that we learned from the stress test last year. We also recognize that our dependence on a single supplier is often driven by being picked out individually by the weaknesses that individual member states can sometimes have when they are faced with negotiating with a strong partner. And so these weaknesses are exploited within intergovernmental agreements, which is why there's already a commission decision given the commission of power of X post review of intergovernmental agreements relating to energy supplies. A strong sense, looking at the evidence, if you read through the document and you see why, that this needs to be looked at again. And then we need to take account of two things. First of all, X post is maybe too late. And the second point is, the related point is, actually sometimes the intergovernmental agreement where a member state has entered into negotiations with a large energy supplier who might be trying to exploit its vulnerable position. The real damage, so to speak, is being done in the commercial agreement associated with that. And so we're looking very carefully at how we can ensure that that's not what's happening, that the commission has effective access to ensure that the commercial agreements associated with the intergovernmental agreements are not undermining the internal market and our collective security supply. Recognizing, of course, the need to ensure commercial confidentiality. This isn't a procedure for just opening up all kinds of information to the wider public. But to anybody who says, well, look at how can we do that? How can we trust the commission to look at this kind of commercial information? I'd say, I mean, DG competition, on a regular basis, looks at the most sensitive areas of competition. And if there's one area that we can be fairly confident that we don't get leaks in in Brussels, it's out of DG competition in relation to state aid investigations or antitrust investigations or merger investigations. This information doesn't leave the commissioners perfectly able to keep this information confidential, but nonetheless ensure that the aims and purposes of the terror market are met. And we have the idea of creating and facilitating a diversification of energy supplies, looking at alternative supplies coming from the southern corridor and what needs to be done to realize that, ongoing discussions with states in the region, and looking at alternative supplies in terms of using our LNG facilities with development of an LNG strategy. And here I can put the emphasis on using as well as building new ones. There are facilities available within Europe and we have to look at, well, what are the blocks? Is the problem that you cannot import to Spain and then transport that to other parts of Europe? That you cannot import to the Netherlands and then reverse flow all the way through different parts of Germany or even further east? These are practical issues about how the system is operated as a whole, as well as looking at where additional LNG might be needed as part of an increase in the robustness and the resilience of the European system. Looking at the aims of creating a fully integrated internal energy market, let's look at some of the concrete actions, some of them literally concrete poured into the ground. Well, building on the work we have already, there's a electricity infrastructure regulation and the projects of common interests and looking for the second list of projects of common interests and how that can be done. But think here, there's two points I want to emphasize that are particularly interesting from an Irish point of view, which will be the European electricity market design project and the regional cooperation, how that happens. So the European electricity design, in some respects, is the complement from the gas side of looking at security supply, which also looks at security electrified. The complement in the electricity side is the market design. And it's the sense of stepping up to the challenge, as I say, the challenge of success, that we have large volumes of renewables on the system, that we have to manage and manage in an efficient way, that we have to ensure that investments are made in the future based on clear long-term market signals, that we have to ensure that renewables and new renewables can be built based on this and that they can be traded across borders, both in the short term and in thinking of the long term. And these are the issues that are being looked at in terms of market design. And another final very important thing here is the aim of market design is to take the benefit of new information computer technology, ICT, and to link the wholesale and the retail markets, so that this idea that consumers and citizens can participate in the electricity transition, the energy transition, is real. So right now, we in the Commission are at the advanced stages of preparing a consultative communication to look at all these areas, which we hope to publish and we intend to publish in July. And that will set out questions, it will set out a political vision and also concrete questions, political questions but also technical questions about how this market design should look in the future. What that will involve in the next steps are, well we'll have the first reports back with the State of the Energy Union at the end of the year, but I'll come back to the State of the Energy Union, leading to the development of detailed legislation built on engagement with stakeholders which is already starting over the next year and a half, year, year and a half, so that by the end of 2016 we should have concrete legislative proposals on the table. They should be well linked to other areas I'm going to come to now, very well linked to the future renewables and renewables reform of the renewables directive. It should be very clear, it should address issues that are burning for many people, how to integrate capacity mechanisms across borders, how to address this question of state interventions, how to ensure that the short-term and the long-term security system is delivered, looking at how we can trade across borders, as I say, long-term and short-term. I'm not making any of the other points less important, I just noticed the time and I'm focusing on that, I think maybe the audience is most interested in here, but feel free to raise your hand and say actually, Ty, talk about vulnerable consumers, our energy prices costs. Energy efficiency, again one of the dimensions, one of the important dimensions of system, so some of this is building on existing work, clearly the energy efficiency directive is already there, but looking at how it can be renewed and I would say that one of the clear and important issues here is going to be getting the link between energy efficiency, some of the elements of the energy efficiency directive that I've already started, which annoy certain energy suppliers, this one percent obligation, but looking at that and saying how can we actually begin to again deliver the transition to energy service companies, linking back to the wholesale retail market integration. What are the areas that we have to really look at in terms of where do the obligations sit at European level in terms of delivering our ambition and where does this come out of national levels? We want to develop related to that a heating and cooling strategy, now I could put this under a renewables area or this area, but in terms of where do we consume energy and we consume it for heating and cooling in large part, so looking at what flows out of that. The work has already started on this, started through the detailed analytical work for the review of the starting to do the detail analytical work to review the energy efficiency directive, which is itself tied to the wider aim of the European Union to look forward towards a increase in our ambition from the 27 percent set by the European Council last year up to 30 percent increase in energy efficiency. Another important point here and we see it in the action as well is the aim to have a smart finance or smart buildings approach. This is not necessarily yellow, it might need some complementary legislative proposal. There are different tools that can be used that exist already to achieve this and we're looking at those in quite some detail to see how can we do that. What tools and then flowing out of that if we need to have support from existing financial institutions in a framework for doing that, whether we need to have some change to some legislation, this is not primarily a legislative approach decarbonizing the economy. So it's very easy to say we're going to hit 40 percent reductions. Well in greenhouse gas emissions, 43 percent reductions in the ETS sector. We start to see the interactions now though, that's 30 percent in the energy non ETS sector. Give or take it's 30 percent. How do we do that? Well where does it come from? How much is it delivered by the heating cooling strategy and a shift towards renewables? Our energy efficiency and the electricity market design. Each one of these dimensions are very much that, it's just a prism by which you can look at the overall challenges that we have. Well two points I want to raise here in terms of looking at these interactions is the looking at road transport. It's going to be incredibly important and it's part of our aims to integrate and to mainstream the connections between the transport agenda and the energy agenda and the climate agenda. And again, I'd point out to this is one of the reasons why we now have a vice president for energy union who's able to bring this together at an early stage and look at it and see the connections between climate policy and transport policy. In terms of renewables, well again in renewables we have the challenge of a European target of 27 percent. But does that translate into national targets? Do we build up or do we build down? Well I think the aim is to be, no matter what, to be clear that we're meeting our aims in a cost-effective way. And this is where we'll see, and you'll see it already coming in the proposals, already in the consultation, excuse me, in July, the beginning of this link to be drawn out between cross-border participation and allowing renewables to be traded across borders effectively, renewable energy. Taking on board the lessons from the experience with the cooperation mechanism, looking for ways that can be improved or where its shortcomings can be addressed and remembering that this is a European target now. I'm nearly finished and then we can start to move into actual questions and maybe you can see what you can actually drag out of me that I haven't said, that you think I haven't said. But I want to point this out here, this link between the integrated set plan, the idea of looking at research innovation, having a global technology innovation leadership, thinking of a way that we can develop the technologies in Europe and then export them related to renewables, related to energy efficiency, related to the management of the system, something that Ergbert already has experience with here, maybe in advance of anybody else, as well as the link with transport. I just want to focus here on the pure energy side of things. In the preparation of the energy union framework strategy and the preparation of that document, this was the hardest part to write. I can tell you that it was changing radically right up to the very end as the need to bring all these different parts together led you to look at it in slightly different ways with the clear knowledge at all stages that it was critically important that we begin to deliver on this. That's also one I think where you can see again the value of this new approach from this commission which will be hopefully can deliver successes but so we come back in five years time and say this has been a success. It links together work in the joint research center in the director general for research and technological development in DG energy in DG trade. Actually in this stage I was calling up I said well actually there's more than that. There's DG education and culture which has these knowledge and innovation clusters which are located there and they've got a very good one here in that so why aren't we hearing from them yet so I had to call up people directly say what's the feed in here because the areas of research innovation education are spread out and yet this is where the answers to delivering our problems are going to be. Now we will see the first results of the new way of thinking with the focus and four key areas that was set out in the energy union document coming in the second half of this year with the new set plan with the communication of the set plan. I think next year then we'll start to see this coming in the energy global technology innovation leadership where the DGs where the director is general where the staff where the technical people are really sitting together and through and working these ideas out now and seeing where the interactions between each other's policies are and how that can be done to deliver with the benefits that's bringing and that's as again I'll say my little bit of own propaganda for what I think Ireland can do it's where there are real gains here where it's talking about the application of information technology and computer technology I read through some statistics shortly before I came here how much more the proportion of GDP Ireland's GDP was from ICT and that's not just transfer pricing and some of those skills and knowledge and understanding are precisely what's going to be needed to manage the energy transition so looking at governance well the European commission has committed to producing an annual state of the energy union report this will serve as the key point where we can update on progress update on the commitments and the undertakings that have been given by member states in relation to renewables or energy efficiency set out the way forward for what our policy proposals are likely to be so this is I think this will become a key date in the energy calendar from the future so when's the key date going to be it's still being worked out precisely but it'll be in the towards the end of this year and quarter three actually quarter four sorry I shouldn't say three or four in quarter four of this year and we also are looking very in very detail at how we can streamline the reporting and planning so let's just talk about some of the reporting and everybody knows this is always hard work but there's every every piece of European legislation often has some kind of report attached to it somewhere and the aim is to bring those together as far as possible into a single report not every report will sit in but to bring the key political messages so that the messages don't get lost so that the information that's been provided by member states is brought up and can be communicated and then used in an effective way so while reporting shouldn't be just for its own sake it's also the consolidation of reporting shouldn't be just for its own sake it's to allow a policy development process to be done effectively we're also looking in in detail about what this means for the reporting member states in terms of their planning Ireland's development of white paper and well how's that white paper development process going to fit into the wider European climate and energy and climate strategy what elements do we think that need to be in that in order to allow the wider European Union to do its work I could say the same thing about the UK or Germany or France or Poland so there's we need to be an element of where we can collectively talk and send back the information over back so another element of fear of governance and this is something I want to talk about as well is the idea of the regional approach to the energy and climate policy framework now there's two levels at which the regionalization can happen one is the let's call it the political level where it's about the setting of targets and the understanding of the impact that each decision will have on its own well if we expect to have 40 percent renewables in our energies in our electricity system what does that mean for you and your neighboring system what do we need to think about to integrate the systems between the UK and Ireland do we want to have that happen or not high level political regional approaches a sharing of information of development of structure and the other level of which regional approach becomes very important is in the in the practical day-to-day cooperation and I think this is something where I am very fortunate that I got to work on the Irish system as the single electricity market was integrated I think many of the ideas that you see was like are fitted into that the idea of having a cross-border system planning flowing out of wider energy policy targets the idea of having cross-border system operation and cross-border market operation some of this will have to happen at a regional level building on the experience we've had so far across Europe whether that was with day ahead market coupling or elements of gas markets so keeping these two regional approaches in common with each other is going to be very important one to allow policy decisions we made the other one to allow the real effects of those policy decisions to be addressed and for example relating this back to the market design there's no doubt that elements of market design will need to be implemented first on a regional level just as we saw with market coupling just we see with many different areas this will raise important issues for Ireland clearly in terms of how it relates to the wider regional areas that with France and the UK and how that's done in terms of both markets market design elements of it but also in terms of planning and thinking about the interaction of those resources happen and in very small writing oops action points the action points is the well there's 15 depending on how you count it you can some sub points there as usual there are some negotiations about this looking at the foreign element of it the external dimension with sub points within points but I think they are set out something that you can hold the commission's feet to the far too in five years time and say did we deliver on those I think equally how they get translated into the annex to the energy union document is very important with the I can't remember 43 actions 43 individual actions again with the possibility of things where they set out look at these are the legislative programs that we imagine these are the concrete initiatives be that setting up an infrastructure form be that having a consultation on energy market design this year or gas security supply legislation this year or review of the impact sorry Sydney review of the intergovernmental agreements next year thank you for your attention so normally comes up there but I think I might have left it off and I hope I've got to give you some sense of where it is that we're coming from how we see the interconnections from the different areas I really look forward to taking questions and even maybe give you some more background on some of some of the tensions in the development of the the documents thank you very much