31. Urges Member States to decide on a new coherent EU energy policy during the 2006 Spring European Council, with three main objectives: securing energy supply, sustainable development, and economic competitiveness; therefore, suggests, first, a common action to reinforce political and economic links with supplier countries as well as to create an EU internal energy market with a proper and non-discriminatory competitive environment for energy suppliers and distributors, second, setting a balance between internal and external sources of supply, third, focusing on avoiding double price/exchange rate volatility by invoicing commodities a ...[+++]nd energy supplies in euros, fourth, improving energy efficiency, and fifth, phasing out oil dependency by stepping up the EU's research aiming at the achievement of a new sustainable energy regime based on wind, hydro, biomass, solar and geothermal energy;

31. Urges the Member States to decide on a new coherent EU energy policy during the 2006 Spring European Council, with three main objectives: a secure energy supply, sustainable development, and economic competitiveness; therefore suggests, first, launching common action to reinforce political and economic links with supplier countries as well as to create an EU internal energy market in a competitive and non-discriminatory environment for energy suppliers and distributors, second, setting a balance between internal and external sources of supply, third, focusing on avoiding double price/exchange rate volatility by invoicing commodities ...[+++] and energy supplies in euros, fourth, improving energy efficiency, and fifth, phasing out oil dependency by stepping up the EU's research aiming at the achievement of a new sustainable energy regime based on wind, hydro, biomass, solar and geothermal energy;

Member States shall remove barriers to the demand for energy efficiency measures and energy efficiency services, and restrictions on the delivery thereof and ensure, in compliance with the objectives of energy market liberalisation, that energy distributors and/or retail energy sales companies selling electricity, gas, district heat and/or heating oil, coal and motor fuel :

From the recent past and its frenzied emphasis on high productivity, we have inherited a situation which, in the agricultural sector just as – too often – elsewhere, has subordinated policy to the major food-processing groups and major distributors resulting in mad cows, dioxin-contaminated chickens, motor oil in cooking oil, sewage sludge in cattle meal, and who knows what else?

In 1979, when the French government reformed its state oil distribution regime to bring it into line with the monopoly provisions of the EEC Treaty, it agreed with the Commission objective criteria for licensing oil distributors.

Thus, following the Commissions intervention, both the formal criteria for licensing oil distributors and the manner in which these criteria are applied in practice have been changed to the satisfaction of the complainant.