9th FSR & BNetzA Forum on the Legal Issues of Energy Regulation

27 October 2017

This year marks the ninth year of the collaboration between the FSR Energy Law and Policy Area and Bundesnetzagentur, the German regulatory office. The forum is designed to provide a platform for debate and exchange on the most relevant issues currently facing national regulatory authorities in the energy sector.

The ambitious legislative proposals of the Clean Energy Package, released in late 2016, signalled an overhaul of several of the current systems at both market and governance level, with considerable implications for national regulatory authorities (NRAs). Over the past several months, NRAs in the Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) have released a series of white papers, partly in conjunction with the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER), in response to these proposals. The aim of this forum is to interrogate the issues discussed in these white papers with the key stakeholders from a regulatory, legal, and economic perspective, to evaluate the challenges of the proposals and consider the next steps towards implementation.

The programme for the forum will be divided into three sessions, the first of which will concentrate on the implications of the Package on the energy market. The session will consider the unfolding new market rules, with a particular focus on the changing role of the distribution system operator (DSO), the unbundling of DSOs, and how to effectively unlock the demand side of the market and promote greater flexibility. For the second session, the discussion will then turn to the electricity market, examining the system operation, congestion management and the future role of capacity mechanisms. The session will also examine the shift toward regionalisation and the new governance structures and coordination necessary to implement this. The final session of the forum will turn to gas issues and evaluate the new security of supply package in terms of gas quality and infrastructure.

Read all of the white papers released by CEER and ACER, which will form a central part of the discussions at the forum.