Secretariat proposes legal measures to support go-live of electricity market coupling projects between Contracting Parties and EU Member States

At yesterday’s virtual meeting, the Secretariat outlined its new concept for a staged implementation of EU Regulation 2015/1222 on electricity capacity allocation and congestion management (CACM Regulation) in the Energy Community to electricity market participants from the EU and Contracting Parties. The interest and active contributions of more than 80 representatives of regulators, electricity network operators, market operators, Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) and the European Commission underscored the timeliness of the discussions.

With this initiative, the Secretariat reacts on a deficiency of the existing legal framework in the Energy Community that runs short of providing a basis for legally binding market coupling arrangements between Contracting Parties and EU Member States that are expected to go live as of mid-2021. Closing this legal gap is part of ongoing negotiations to reform the Energy Community Treaty. The Secretariat’s proposal aims at providing a bridging solution until the Treaty reform measures will be in place.

The key pillars of the presented concept are the implementation of the CACM Regulation in the Contracting Parties as a first step which should give the minimum legal certainty needed for, in a second step, establishing market coupling projects between Contracting Parties and the EU Single Day-Ahead Coupling (SDAC) in the form of contractual arrangements. The need for Contracting Parties to abide by existing SDAC arrangements and established EU rules is another core element of the Secretariat’s concept.

The Secretariat also introduced its proposal for implementation of Regulation 2016/1719 on electricity forward capacity allocation in the Contracting Parties. Providing the necessary legal backing for the go-live of first market coupling projects in mid-2021 will require efforts from all sides for a speedy adoption of the Regulations still in 2020.