Centraal-Europese EU-landen willen steun voor energieprojecten (en)
The so-called Visegrad countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - have in a joint letter to EU energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger i on Tuesday (14 September) called for Brussels' support on a series of energy infrastructure projects.
The wishlist outlines transition routes which they hope could become priority projects for the EU when deciding its next financial mechanism for transition networks in 2011.
The discussion about a potential new energy financial instrument for funding the schemes "should cover all potential sources ... including the instruments of the [EU budget's] cohesion policy," the letter, quoted by Polish press agency, says.
At present, the EU is co-funding some gas and electricity infrastructure investments to plug funding gaps arising from the financial crisis. Under standard circumstances the EU can pay part of the money needed to finance feasibility studies, but not the actual building work.
The Visegrad countries hope that formal EU prioritisation of the projects would also attract more private investors and make bank loans cheaper to obtain.
The Visegrad states also met in Brussels on Thursday morning to co-ordinate their national positions ahead of the broader EU27-level summit later in the day. The breakfast meeting was attended by EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy i.
"Visegrad has always been a stable part of an integration process, but it is also a group which historically has common interests," Slovak Prime Minister Iveta Radicova i said after the meeting.
One of the interests of central European countries is to preserve their poor regions' access to cohesion funds in the 2014 to 2020 EU budget.
"We must not hide the fact that the will of net contributors to pay to the European funds will not be large, so we will face much harder discussions [than in the past]," Slovak foreign minister Mikulas Dzurinda said on Tuesday in Bratislava at a Visegrad ministerial event.
Foreign minister of Hungary Janos Martonyi, whose country will take over the EU Presidency in the first half of 2011, followed by Poland in the second half, said the Visegrad co-operation is "not an alternative" to EU integration, but complements it.