Today, our Secretary General Angelo Ferrante participated in the COP 29 side event “Building a Shared Vision: Clean Energy Perspectives for a Sustainable Mediterranean” organised by the UfM.
Together with Houda Allal, OMEC Director General; Maged Mahmoud, RCREEE Acting Executive Director; Hasan Ozkoc, MEDREG Secretary General; and Roberta Boniotti, MEDENER Secretary-General, the session aimed to identify priorities, challenges, and opportunities for advancing clean energy in the region, providing the opportunity to:
- Identify critical investment priorities and infrastructure requirements to support renewable energy, hydrogen production, and energy efficiency.
- Highlight regulatory and policy challenges that require alignment across borders to foster an integrated and resilient Mediterranean energy market.
- Lay the groundwork for a roadmap that reflects the region’s unique environmental and socio-economic challenges, emphasizing actionable steps to enhance energy cooperation and sustainability.
- Strengthen coordination among regional actors by aligning on a shared vision and preparing to bring these priorities to the Member States for further refinement and implementation.
The input collected from these discussions will serve as a foundation for future engagements with UfM Member States on a collaborative clean energy roadmap for 2025-2027.
Mr. Ferrante intervened in the roundtable discussion “Addressing Key Challenges and Opportunities,” highlighting the Association’s priorities. He pointed out how the development of the grid is the real backbone for the transition in the region and how regional integration is one of the key measures to foster the energy transition. He also underlined that the benefits of integration are not yet fully understood, as countries tend to develop national solutions instead of promoting pooling of resources. In this way, they often fail or slow down their decarbonisation plans.
He recalled how Med-TSO, as the association of Mediterranean TSOs, has been working for several years on the technical interoperability of the Mediterranean Power Systems by producing Mediterranean-wide network development plans and harmonised rules for the operation of the interconnected electricity networks, assessing 19 projects, promoted bottom-up by Med-TSO Members, for an amount of 12 billion EUR investments, about 19 GW additional interconnection capacity and more than 10.000 km HV lines.
In his conclusion, he stated that integration is possible only by defining a regional grid development plan at the Mediterranean level and an effective regional policy framework connected to efficient financial instruments.