Geert Bourgeois said there is a growing consensus on the continent that it would be a mistake to “punish” the UK for leaving the EU.
The proposed union “would promote an integrated sphere for offshore energy and marine research, and as well as better grid network with interconnectors to drive down costs and boost back-up power”, according to the article.
Bourgeois said the idea was first put forward six years ago by the German town of Bremen, which used to be part of the Hanseatic League – a historical trading confederation made up of merchant guilds and market towns from around the North and Baltic seas.
“More and more people now agree that there has to be a ‘soft’ Brexit,” he told the paper. “I can’t imagine a situation where we have more barriers on trade in both directions. You are our fourth biggest export market. It is in our mutual interest to find a solution, and the majority of the EU now agrees that anything other than a soft Brexit would have a huge cost.”
He continued: “I am not proposing a new ‘EU’. My idea is a light structure on an intergovernmental basis, like the Mediterranean Union. There are so many areas in which we can work together on the enormous potential of ‘blue industry’ in the oceans.”
North Sea countries have already made efforts to create an integrated offshore grid in the area. The North Seas Countries Offshore Grid Initiative was formed in 2009/10 by 10 countries, including Britain, to work towards this end.
In early June, the European Commission and a group of nine countries – the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden and Norway but not the UK – declared their intention to enhance cooperation on the construction and planning on offshore wind farms in the North Sea.
In the same month Ofgem awarded a license to a 1.4GW interconnector between the UK and Norway’s south-west region, which has been dubbed the “green battery”. The link will enable power from offshore wind farms in the UK to be stored using the area’s numerous pumped storage hydropower plants.