The executive director of the European Environment Agency (EEA) Jacqueline McGlade has said that the European Union needs a unified energy policy to replace member states' individual energy strategies, in order to combat climate change and to improve the security of supply, according to comments reported in the Financial Times.

McGlade argues that the huge investment required to modernise energy infrastructure demands a Europe-wide agreement on the future of energy, without which countries and companies were unlikely to be able to embark on such a process, the paper reports.

A unified energy policy would help combat the short-term approach of many member states, according to McGlade, saying that a far-reaching overhaul of the system would include a move away from centralised power stations towards distributed generation.