| Summary: | The European Union seeks to build an integrated energy area. Begun with the desire to create a common market, this integration was then fleshed out with e.g. security of supply and energy transition. The discourse of the European institutions on this integration have evolved to become a defence of the European level as the optimum for an integrated energy area. Faced with this discourse, other divisions are supported both by other actors and, more paradoxically, by the European Commission itself. This contribution seeks to highlight the interplay of actors and power games behind these discourses on the division of the European energy area. It follows on from the work of Anglo-Saxon geography on the constructed character of scales (Smith, 1992; Agnew, 1993; Howitt, 1993; Marston, Jones III, Woodward, 2005; Moore, 2008). This leads to question the (fuzzy) notion of optimality that runs through these debates and to contribute to a reflection on the spatial models and scales for the European energy policy by raising the question of intermediate scales and spaces. It analyses the process of energy transition and the representations and postulates that this transition, by leading to a rethinking of the political, technical and economic scales of reference for energy in Europe, is part of a scalar recalibration (Brenner, 2004) which oscillates between various scales. The methodology relies on qualitative analysis of the corpus of technical and legislative literature produced by the European institutions (Commission and European Parliament), as well as on interviews and fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2016, with various players in the energy sector in the European Union: European network managers, regulators, major energy groups, consultation meetings involving these players and local NGOs or collectives. This paper puts forwards four main results. First, the building of a European energy area is far from being limited to the establishment of a European Energy Union, through the processes of European integration and energy transition. Second, intermediate actors (network managers, regulators, NGOs, sometimes governments) generate spatial divisions at other scales than the one thought by the Commission at the European level. They may reflect technical issues (congestion and technical integration of transmission networks) or economic issues (delimitation of markets) and are therefore empirically optimal reference grids for the management of an energy sector undergoing integration. They may also be the result of a political stance. Third, the Commission's position in this context is surprisingly ambiguous. Although it supports the predominance of the European level, which it considers as an optimal scale a priori for the energy policy, it is nevertheless the originator or partner of a certain number of these sub-European intermediate divisions. Fourth, the role played by these alternative divisions thus calls into question both the uniqueness of the European level as a reference scale for energy in the EU and the optimal nature of this level for the implementation of the regional integration and energy transition processes that support the three pillars of the Union's common energy policy.
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