13 / 28
Introduction
XIII
because of this complimentarity, Greece has the unique opportunity of becoming a sig-
nificant regional energy hub in the South-East Region of the EU.
The EU’s political, economic and institutional reach goes far beyond its own borders,
however. In his paper, Charokopos recognizes that it is not enough for the EU to focus
solely on its internal uniform Energy policy. This is why he examines the future of the
Energy Community (EC) that represents Europe’s most ambitious undertaking to fulfill
its aspiration for integration in the energy sector beyond its borders. The EC is thus a
constituent part of EU external energy policy. Can Europe fulfill its aspirations with a
‘one size fits all’ approach or does it need to demonstrate more reflexivity and to intro-
duce the concept of flexibility in order to enhance the effectiveness of the EC and facil-
itate its further enlargement towards countries with no EU accession prospect? In his
conclusion, and having taken into account the reality on the ground and the conflict-
ing viewpoints on the future of the EC, the author stipulates that flexibility is needed
and what remains to be seen is what kind of flexibility will be the most effective.
In her contribution, Loverdou goes a step further to specifically look at issues of Energy
Security for the most vulnerable Member States of the EU, many of which continue
to rely heavily on Russian supplies of natural gas. While the Shah Deniz Consortium’s
Final Investment Decision (FID) to develop the gas from the Azeri gas field in
Azerbaijan, marked a milestone in EU strategy to ensure security of supply, its choice
of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), rather than of Nabucco - for the delivery of this gas
to Europe- generated serious concerns for Central and South East Europe, the region
meant to be the primary beneficiary of the new gas supplies.
In the third and final section, scholars and practitioners touch upon new challenges
and ways to approach issues of sustainability and environmental protection in view of
the worsening climate crisis.
In his contribution Sgouridis, acknowledges that our societies need to transition to
a renewable energy (RE) base in about four decades to avoid the worst consequences
of climate change. The rate at which we install RE capacity needs to accelerate by a
factor of 30 to 50 to achieve this drastic transformation and its appropriate value de-
pends both on how our societies choose to phase-out fossil fuels as well as on the vi-
ability of the alternative resources measured by the Energy Return on Energy Invested
(EROEI). The author, furthermore, sheds light on the recurring conflict between those
who believed that technology can overcome any constraint on growth and those who
claimed the opposite, leading us down a path that imperils the viability of our plane-
tary ecosystem. His paper concludes by suggesting that our societies need to transition
from economies based on stocks to economies based on flows and that the Sustainable
Energy Transition (SET) need not be disruptive nor uniform but tailor-made.
In his paper, prompted by Greece’s ongoing recession, Paravantis focuses on the grow-
ing problem of energy poverty, basing his findings on three empirical research works
on fuel poverty in Athens. His data confirms that fuel poor households are in an en-
ergy trap that is difficult to escape from and may create a fuel poverty societal gap not