The European trade unions, on their side, draw up their assessment on the “results of the domestic market”. Thus, at the time of a conference organized in Brussels on 3 and 4 November 2005 by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), an overwhelming report, written by Steve Thomas of the University of Greenwich, was made public. This study shows well the negative consequences of the European directives on gas and electricity about employment and guaranteed service.
According to this report, competition did not bring any positive effect for the users, and the negative conse-quences are numerous as regards employment (300 000 removed jobs), of reliability of energy supplying, research and development. The fact that the energy domestic market does not give any awaited result is absolutely indisputable.
The concentrations took place with the detriment of the small consumers. For them, the tariffs increase because the operators make pay the households and the consumers with low income the unrestrained competition which they engage for the industrial important customers.
The report stresses that, as regards reliability of the energy supplying, there are three major problems which are not solved but, on the contrary, worsened:
„X The market will not build enough power stations.
„X The companies will not invest enough in training, research and development.
The current regulation, which pushes the operators to compress their costs exclusively to get profits in the very short term, encourages policies of irresponsible economies which compromise reliability.
The European Commission seems to be unaware of the results of this investigation. So it shows the growing ditch between the collective interests of European wage-earners and citizens and the private interests of the large Energy transnational corporations to which it is entirely subjected.
It is not thus a chance which the energy sector, more currently coveted by the transnationals, shows a vertiginous rise of the prices which beat all the records. The euro bureaucrats of Brussels (who don’t care of realities) hasten to give a very ready explanation: it is because competition is not yet sufficient! Really!!
The European Energy Markets Observatory (launched in 2001 by Capgemini, one of the world leaders of the council in management) has just published its last study which also affirms what one knows already: the rise in the prices of energy will last.
Regarding oil, this vital public property today quasi completely transferred (not without complicities!) in private hands, the upward trend is especially heavy: from 30 dollars in September 2003, the barrel reached 70 dollars at mid-2005, points out Capgemini.
For the energy markets in the course of deregulation, one of the principal stakes will be the speed to which the current tariffs, establish by the national authorities and not by the market, will be liberalised.
The prices of electricity can fly soar very soon. Until now, the promoters of the market sometimes abstained. In the case of EDF in France, the situation is a little special, specifies the study. Even if the company is already put in the market, the contract of public service provides that during 3 next years the increase in the tariffs will not exceed the threshold of inflation.
How the investors can thus put up with this tariff supervision, whereas the private interests of the shareholders are above the interests of the citizens and those of the State? Is it surprising the reduction of the investments deprived in the infrastructures of production and transport of energy, which was highlighted by this study of Capgemini?
This maintaining of high prices of energy exerts a strong impact. It will do nothing but perpetuate the recent acceleration of the activities of fusion and acquisition, in the search of new profits which are sources of economic and financial aggressiveness of the multinationals.
They are thus the transnational companies operating in the energy sector, relayed by their accomplices in the bodies’ decision makers and administrative on all the levels, which benefit from this great privatisation of energy on a European and world scale.