So, this is it. Brexit is the result of the referendum been held yesterday in the UK regarding its membership in the European Union (EU) bloc. The winning camp of the Britons supporting the termination of the UK's EU membership has suggested that exiting the bloc will repatriate the UK's policy-making power from Brussels back to London. Is this true and how the new policy-making structure will affect the UK's renewable energy sector? Despite of where one stands in the referendum debate, the fact is that the UK's energy policy was always made in London, not in Brussels. UK energy policy was always UK-madeThe UK liberalised its electricity sector in 1989 (via the Electricity Act 1989) and from this point onwards power investment was led by market forces alone, with natural gas being the preferred investment. Contrary to the referendum discourse, it is the UK that shaped the EU energy policy at large, not the opposite. The EU policy of unbundling the electricity sector (implying the separation of the generation assets from the transmission and distribution grids) was promoted based on the British case, which together with some other EU countries (e.g. the Nordic member-states) had already unbundled their electricity sector. In fact, the adoption of the so-called 'third legislative package' in 2009, which is the EU directive promoting the liberalisations of the bloc's electricity sectors, was considered from London as a very weak one. The EU directive asks from member-states to separate the management of the transmission networks from the power generators, but the UK was in favour of the full ownership unbundling, meaning total ownership separation of the generators and the networks, which the EU directive makes optional. UK renewable energy policy Specifically ...Den vollständigen Artikel lesen ...