The EU Court of Justice interprets the concept of intervention through state resources and finds that the offset of additional costs arising from the obligation to purchase green electricity constituted state intervention (Vent de Colère)

The Non-Equivalence of the Various Methods of Supporting Green Electricity* Introduction Ever since the judgment of the Court of Justice in 2001 on PreussenElektra [case C-379/98], Member States have been grappling with the question of how to support electricity from renewable resources [green electricity] without granting State aid. In PreussenElektra the Court found that there was no transfer of state resources and no State aid, because the German government imposed an obligation on electricity distributors to buy green electricity without establishing a mechanism that would have allowed it to exercise control over the resources that flowed between users, distributors and producers of electricity. By contrast, in its judgment on Essent in 2008 [case C-206/06], the Court of Justice