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What the heck is a trilogue?

3,597 views · Published 13 June 2018 · 5:12 · Indexed 23 September 2026

Channel: Euractiv · 2018 · News & Politics

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Follow the live blog here: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/trilogue-time-for-eu-clean-energy-laws/

Hey guys, welcome to todays live blog on the clean energy package trilogue negotiations. I’m Dave Keating and I’ll be giving you the latest developments as EU lawmakers fight it out over Europe’s energy future.

But before we go into what’s at stake today, let’s back up a second because some of you may be asking, what the heck is a trilogue? Well it’s one of these Brussels jargon words that refers to the last stage in the EU lawmaking process.

It’s when the EU’s three lawmaking institutions – the Commission, the Council and the Parliament come together to agree the final version of a law. It’s a dialogue that involves three institutions, hence a trilogue. Get it? Yes, it’s a nonsense word made up by eurocrats that I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually exist in the English language.

After the European Commission proposes a new piece of legislation, it then passes to the European Parliament, the directly elected chamber representing EU citizens, and the European Council, the chamber representing the 28 national governments in the EU. In this case, it specifically goes to the Energy Council, made up of all 28 national energy ministers.

The Parliament and the Council each make changes to the Commission’s proposal and adopt their own proposed version of the law. These two different versions then need to be reconciled and combined into one version – and these talks are called the trilogues.

For those familiar with the American lawmaking process, it’s essentially the same thing as what we call the ‘conference committee’, which reconciles the two versions of a piece of legislation drawn up by the Senate and the House of Representatives.

In the US the combined version of the proposed law then has to go to the President, who can veto it if he doesn’t like it. In the EU this also applies to the Commission, the EU’s executive branch, which could theoretically veto the proposal by withdrawing it, if it thinks it’s been changed beyond all recognition in the trilogue process. In reality this basically never happens though.

The trilogue agreement also has to be approved by a vote of the full Parliament and the full Council before it becomes law. Again, the agreement is almost always approved.

The clean energy trilogues

So – what’s so special about these particular trilogies? They are some of the last pieces of legislation left to be adopted in the Clean Energy Package, which was proposed by the Commission to help the EU meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement. The two laws being debated today are the Renewable Energy Directive and the Energy Efficiency Directive.

The renewables law would set a mandatory target for the proportion of renewable energy in the overall energy system that must be met by each EU member state by 2030. The other law would require member states to save a certain amount of energy use by that time by implementing efficiency measures.

What will be interesting to watch today is whether things have changed because of new governments in Spain and Italy. The trilogue negotiations are always conducted by one representative from each institution. For the Parliament, that is whichever MEP has been apppinted rapporteur on the file For the Council, one particular country negotiates on behalf of all 28, based on a mandate that the others agreed to give to them. That country is whichever one holds the rotating 6-month presidency of the Council, which at the moment happens to be Bulgaria.

Member states agreed on a mandate for these two negotiations several months ago. But since then, we’ve seen political earthquakes in Italy and Spain which have brought populist and leftist governments to power. Both of those new governments are much more ambitious on fighting climate change than their predecessors.

So the mandate agreed several months ago probably isn’t valid any more, and Bulgaria can go further toward the parliament’s position which, as usual, is far more ambitious than the Council’s.

Why is the Parliament’s version of legislation almost always more ambitious than the Councils? Well that would require a whole other explanatory viceo, but suffice it to say it’s because the MEPs aren’t the ones who actually have to implement the legislation.

So there you have it, that’s what’s at stake today. Follow the live blog today to learn more about each country’s position and what these legislative changes will mean for you as an energy consumer.

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