The South seeks a strong common energy position before the Council of Europe

Rome, March 16 The heads of the governments of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece will work to agree on a strong common position on energy issues that will join the next committee to promote the reform of the EU energy market that will help Rome reduce electricity prices tomorrow. An Italian government source told Efe about a meeting that Mario Draghi, Pedro Sánchez and Antonio Costa will be attending. Kyriajos Mitotakis will participate in a video conference after testing positive for COVID-19. The situation in Ukraine and the progress of the war will also come to the table, but after the summit, the four countries of Southern Europe will be a platform for achieving their goals during the Council of Europe, which will take place on March 24 and 25 in Brussels. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are in perfect harmony with energy issues, and given the unstable situation in some social sectors due to rising electricity prices and fuel, we hope that tomorrow the EU will be able to target the main goal of acting as soon as possible. A source from the Italian administration told Efe: “Italy's plan is based on three factors: setting gas maximums, implementing a common storage system and taking over at the community level. Italy is almost entirely dependent on gas, since 90% of its annual supply is imported and 45% comes from Russia, so the government insists on imposing a price “limit” to prevent inflation in emergencies like the current one, and Draghi told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (Ursula) in Brussels a few days ago. Draghi is also in favor of creating a joint storage system and, above all, a joint purchase of gas to the European Union (EU), which means more bargaining power than country-specific acquisitions and price reductions. While meeting energy prices and agreeing with Italian counterparties on the need for centralized purchases, Sanchez supports the separation of electricity prices and gas prices, accelerates renewable energy strategies as much as possible, encourages gas interconnection in Spain, providing security and autonomy for the EU. The meeting is part of the contact round of the President of the Spanish government, which began on Wednesday with a meeting with Croatian Prime Minister Andrei Plenkovic in Madrid, and later with Eduard Heger of Slovakia and before moving from Bratislava to Romania, Italy, Germany and Ireland. Following the informal EU summit in Versailles (France), Sanchez announced this tour.This summit required measures to reduce Europe's energy dependence on Russia, which is one of the main topics of the discussion, and Draghi voted in favor of funding energy and military shocks caused by the war and Ukraine's European public debt. Tomorrow the summit will take place at Villa Madama, a 16th-century building, where the Italian executive president will usually start at 11:00 local time (10:00 GMT) and the leaders will issue a statement to the media.