EU: report on the strategies of energy companies and their social and environmental impact

Debt.  In the first part, the study talks about the purchases, mergers, and sales of sites and transmission networks done since 2010 and explains the national division of these businesses’ employees.  Then, the document talks about policies designed to reduce CO2 emissions, pointing out that the Fukushima incident shuffled the strategic choices of businesses using nuclear power: investments will be hard to explain in countries determined to stop production – RWE, E.ON, ENEL, GDF Suez – or will be more expansive for those who have to comply with new regulations, such as EDF in France.  New markets are in the east (Slovakia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania and Finland) but, according to the study, orders and funding aren’t givens.  “Key businesses are done growing, partly because most of them believe that spreading further is useless, but also because financial analysts and credit rating agencies are not fond of the debts arising from these operations.”  Businesses are now increasingly operating outside the EU, in Turkey and Russia for instance, but their debt and the search for new investors are causing them to sell assets and reorganize themselves – EDF, RWE and Vattenfall.  The Europeans (E.ON, GDF Suez and ENEL included) are also interested in the Chinese and Brazilian markets, where growth forecasts are the best.  The report also looks into the growing influence of non-European investors – mostly form China – into the transmission networks.