Luxemburg, 09/06/2006 (Agence Europe) - In Luxemburg on Thursday, the Energy Council adopted conclusions on the working of the internal gas and electricity market. Progress should be made through the 2nd package of directives on electricity and gas leading to full opening of markets in July 2007, while taking into account the specific conditions of some small Member States and some isolated Member States, emphasised the conclusions. To ensure an effective and successful internal market, the Energy Council stressed the importance of a series of key, though not new, actions: - full, effective and transparent implementation of the existing legislation, not only to the letter, but in the spirit; - improving cooperation and coordination between regulators, system operators and governments; - promoting non-regulatory measures, such as sharing best practice among all the players, including operators and regulators; - full application of competition rules, including monitoring of concentration operations; - improving cooperation and dialogue between authorities, especially with regard to issues such as regulation and monitoring access to networks and cross-border trade, to achieve regulatory coherence between Member States and avoid redundant regulations and additional costs; - promoting transparency in price setting and capacities available for both final consumers and operators; - promotion of cross-border trade, integration and regional cooperation; - promotion of investment (particularly in new LNG terminals) and removal of obstacles to investment; - improvement of interconnections (the Council has called on the Commission to draw up a plan of priority interconnections, which has been promised by the Commission for the end of the year); - Community monitoring of supply and demand, taking account of the contribution of renewable energy to the diversification of sources of supply; - promotion in neighbouring countries of approaches similar to those in the internal energy market.
The Council also stressed the need to achieve real unbundling to ensure fair and non-discriminatory access to the network for all system users, and, thus, the development of competition. It also emphasised putting in place measures to increase the fluidity of wholesale gas and electricity markets and to improve access to storage capacity and gas networks. The Council supports a “single network” through the harmonisation of the operating rules of the electric networks and methods of congestion management. Elsewhere, prior to examining new legislation, the Council suggested assessing the impact of the legislation in force and studying the impact of certain factors such as the role of long-term gas contracts and external suppliers, the effect of the European emissions trading scheme and the prices of sources of primary energy, dependence on external suppliers, and how to assess market concentration.
On the external level, the Council stressed the importance of taking due account of the dangers of abuse of positions of strength on the market as a result of dependence on one single supplier, and also reciprocity to ensure fair competition conditions in terms of access to markets and infrastructure, a thinly-veiled reference to relations with Russia.