“Brazil, China, the US are moving ahead at good speed and Europe is working through a lot of issues”, said Steen Riisgaard, chief executive of Novozymes, a Danish company that produces enzyme catalysts for biofuel production. “In the meantime we of course go where the customers are.”

The Desertec alliance of companies intends to begin transmitting energy by underwater ‘interconnector’ cables from countries such as Morocco and Tunisia to Europe by 2015.

Oettinger said on Wednesday (14 November) that if a nuclear power plant is not built in Lithuania, the problems with energy supply security will persist in the entire region, including the Baltic countries, Finland and the Kaliningrad region, the Baltic News Service (BNS) reported.

The EU executive wants member countries to phase out regulated electricity and gas prices, which it says discourage companies from exploring cheaper, more efficient options and other companies from entering the market.

The resulting lack of competition prevents the consumer from getting the best deal, said the report. Subsidies on gas and electricity prices also generate debts, which then fall back on taxpayers, it said. The report found that a total of 18 EU countries currently regulated retail energy prices.

Speaking at the launch of a State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) representation office in Brussels, Oettinger said that the Commission currently believed that its criteria could only be met by the Anatolian section of the Nabucco pipeline.

“But the TANAP pipeline which SOCAR now promotes may also be able to satisfy the criteria of capacity requirements, dedicated infrastructure, transparency and scalability,” Oettinger told the assembled oil and gas executives.

Georg Zachmann is a research fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.

"The internal energy market is the cornerstone of European energy policy. Most consumers like it because it increases competition and eventually reduces their energy bills. Suppliers are partly released from their dependence on the whims of national politicians.

Held back by a struggling world economy and the failure to create commercial conditions which stimulate more green investment, the report by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) and Greenpeace International expected growth of wind power would not accelerate again until after 2020.

Global installed wind capacity reached 240 GW at the end of 2011, it said, but 2013 looks like a difficult year for the sector amid a rocky environment for global financing.

In a report released on Monday, the world's foremost energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA), said the US would benefit from so-called unconventional sources of oil and gas, including shale gas and shale oil, derived from fracking – blasting dense rocks apart to release the fossil fuels trapped within.

The verbatim transcript of a Bulgarian cabinet meeting held on 7 November shows that Bulgaria will pay Gazprom a heavy fine if it doesn’t sign a final investment decision to build the South Stream gas pipeline on its territory by 15 November. Bulgaria also wants its long-term gas import contract with Gazprom to be agreed before the South Stream deal is signed.