2/7 Capacity markets are an energy security tool in 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇧🇪 🇵🇱 🇮🇹 🇮🇪. Auctions are held, with contracts then provided to energy companies to ensure electricity demand can be met - but plants may never be called on to provide power. These contracts are then paid for via energy bills.
3/7 In Europe, just 10 companies have received contracts worth €21.4B from 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇧🇪 🇵🇱 🇮🇹 🇮🇪. These fossil gas freeloaders aren’t just making consumers’ foot the bill, but in cases, these companies have been found to be actively delaying the energy transition.
4/7 In Poland, companies like PGE don't even hide how capacity markets benefit them. It’s a blow to households and businesses across 🇵🇱 that are investing in renewable energy, only for their efforts to be undermined by a subsidy system that helps fossil fuel companies to gatekeep the power market.
5/7 Czech energy giant EP Group, the parent company of EPH, has raked in over €4 billion in capacity contracts awarded by national governments to gas plants since 2015. It’s aggressively developing fossil gas assets all over Europe and greenwashing its image.
6/7 Campaigners are calling on national governments to urgently reconsider all market mechanisms that favour fossil fuel power plants and, instead, prioritise support for clean flexibility solutions like storage, interconnection and grid enhancing technologies. www.euractiv.com/section/eet/...
7/7 “Instead of bankrolling polluters, governments should be backing wind and solar, storage, smarter grids, and demand-side solutions that give us back control of our power systems by ending fossil fuel dependence for good” says @julietphillips.bsky.social beyondfossilfuels.org/2025/06/26/f...
