November 18, 2006: When the Meyer shipyard in the northern German city of Papenburg wanted to move a newly completed cruise ship along the Ems river to the North Atlantic, a Saturday evening seemed to be an appropriate time for the move. A high voltage transmission line across the Ems was shut down at about 10:00 p.m. on November 4 to allow the safe passage of the tall ship down the river. The high voltage line's capacity was transferred to other lines, causing a "chain reaction" tripping of overload circuit breakers along distribution points.

The result was darkness for some ten million Europeans. In Germany over 100 "Deutsche Bahn" trains were halted when power was disrupted, leaving some passengers stranded on stopped trains for nearly two hours. In addition to private households in Germany affected by the blackout, the French utility company RTE reported resulting power outages in Austria, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. In addition, the utility line connecting Spain and Morocco was temporarily disconnected. French media sources called the blackout the largest disruption of electrical service in nearly 30 years.

The blackout revealed an inherent weakness in Europe's electrical distribution system. Electrical power is routinely "exported" across national borders via the trans-national European power grid. However, since each country oversees its own power grid and utility companies, there is no uniform European standard for reliability of transmission lines, failure systems and backup generation capacity. Following the loss of power to Italian consumers, Italy's prime minister Romano Prodi called for a European utility agency. "Electrical connections across Europe without a European utility agency is a contradiction," Prodi stated, urging politicians to intervene. "In Europe everyone depends on everyone else, but there still isn't any joint European energy policy," he added.

Germany's minister of the environment Sigmar Gabriel was not impressed by Prodi's remarks, rejecting the notion that a new European agency was needed. However, Gabriel did agree that better coordination among national utility regulatory agencies was needed. However, in January 2007 European Union energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs plans to present a proposal for mandatory guidelines for European power grids. A spokesman from Piebalgs' office commented that "we have a European grid that has to be administered on the level of the EU."

The lack of EU regulation of an existing de facto European power grid is only one of the anomalies involving the EU and energy. In a different power sector, for example, Europe – as the 2nd largest importer of energy worldwide after the United States – has no European energy policy for imported energy. Instead of EU negotiations with Europe's largest supplier of imported natural gas – Russian energy giant Gazprom – each EU member state negotiates its own price for Gazprom deliveries. With Europe becoming increasingly dependent on imported energy, a European energy agency would seem to be a must for Europe's future.