SSE chief executive Alistair Phillips-Davies has urged Brexit negotiators to clarify the UK-EU energy relationship to avoid scuppering decarbonisation efforts.
Phillips-Davies said a genuine European market, of which Britain is a part, was “critical” to decarbonising electricity, and that a collaborative EU-UK relationship on energy was “imperative”.
Without collaboration, he suggested, the potential to link the UK’s North Sea wind farms with Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands – a formative supergrid or supernode – may be lost.
“Effective co-operation on energy between the UK and countries on mainland Europe can only help gets projects like this ‘off the seabed’,” he said.
Phillips-Davies said he would “stay out of the Leave/Remain politics” but underlined that “it is now for negotiators on both sides to provide clarity on the long-term UK-EU relationship for energy”.
“These are complex matters, but the sooner the parties to the negotiations on the future UK-EU relationship on energy are able to agree a way forward, the better it will be for efforts to take forward the next stages in decarbonising our economy.”
See his full statement here.
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