When presenting the achievements of the Lithuanian Presidency of the EU Council, namely the strengthening of energy security, R.Kriščiūnas hailed such concrete results, as bringing together Baltic and Swedish researchers, willing to work on energy security projects in the Baltic region.
G.Oettinger thanked the Lithuanian Presidency, stressing the importance of geopolitical processes for European energy policy. According to him, thus the implementation of the Commission's Baltic Energy Market Interconnection Plan (BEMIP) is one of the key tools for the Baltic region.
The aim of the newly set up Baltic Energy Security Research platform is to strengthen the role of science in ensuring regional energy security and to provide scientific support for strategic projects, especially the BEMIP projects.
"I am particularly pleased that this innovative idea to create the regional energy security cooperation platform, which was discussed in the beginning of Lithuania's EU Presidency, has become a reality as of today – we officially inaugurate the Baltic Energy Security Research Platform," the Lithuanian Foreign Vice-Minister R.Kriščiūnas said in his address.
The launch of the platform resulted from the international conference "Scientific support to energy security in the Baltic Sea Region", which was co-organised by the Commission's in-house science service – the Joint Research Centre, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania on 4 June as well as the Memorandum of Cooperation, signed between scientific institutions of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Sweden, and the Joint Research Centre on 5 December.
Energy security is one of the priorities for the Lithuanian EU Presidency in line with its commitment to complete the Internal Energy Market and to strengthen the external dimension of the EU's energy policy. These issues are of particular importance for the Baltic Sea region, which aims for full integration into the European Union's Internal Energy Market.
