Since the Lisbon Treaty, energy has formally become part of the group of policies where the EU shares competences with its member states (article 4.2, TFEU). Moreover, the Lisbon Treaty brought for the first time an article exclusively devoted to energy (article 194, TFEU), and therefore the European energy policy now formally has a legal basis for attaining its threefold strategic objective: energy security, competitiveness and the protection of the environment, especially to face the challenges of climate change.
The strong link between the environmental protection and the development of renewable energy has facilitated the latter to become one of the areas related to energy policy where European regulation is most visible. The Climate and Energy Package of 2009 corroborated this tendency by presenting a set of instruments to respond to the challenges the EU faces in this field, including the adoption of a strengthened directive for renewable energy promotion. After years of having a first generation of separated measures on the subject, the directive 2001/77/EC for renewable electricity and the directive 2003/30/EC for the promotion of biofuels, the directive 2009/28/EC gathered the EU efforts in the renewable energy field. Starting from January 1 of 2012, the first generation of measures in the subject has been derogated.
Up to what point does the promotion of renewable energy in the EU contributed to lay the foundation of an energy policy for the Union? How has the first generation of measures aimed to promote renewable energy opened the door to the reinforced 2009 directive? Which are the perspectives of this policy in the EU? The main objective of this paper is to answer these questions by studying the Europeanization of national energy polices in Spain and the United Kingdom through the promotion of renewable energy in the EU.
