On March 8th, the European Commission Directorate for Energy organised a workshop on the study on energy prices and costs, currently subcontracted to the consultancy Trinomics. The workshop focused on the importance of monitoring energy prices, costs and subsidies. It compared domestic energy prices with the international ones and the energy costs for industries. It also assessed the impact of price regulation, particularly from the point of view of energy poverty, and aimed at gathering information from participants. Furthermore, it tackled the issue of energy subsidies, although it only focused on direct subsidies, thus concluding that renewable energies are getting more subsidies than fossil fuels.

The stakeholder consultation workshop underlined the robustness of the data collection of electricity and natural gas prices for the EU. A specific attention was given to electricity prices in the presentation delivered, with a repeated emphasis on the role of subsidies to renewables in the increase in electricity prices and as a barrier to investment.

Unfortunately, the workshop reconfirmed the limited availability of data on the heating and cooling sector, and demonstrated an excessive attention to the electricity sector, for instance by linking it to energy poverty, overshadowing the role of heating in this issue.