Analyse : Développement du marché intérieur de l'électricité en Europe

Des chercheurs de l’Université catholique de Louvain (KUL) examinent les initiatives de libéralisation du secteur de l’électricité à l’échelle mondiale et évaluent de façon comparative le potentiel de développement futur du marché intérieur européen de l’électricité.

The authors describe electricity liberalisation in the EU as a « top-down » process, mainly driven by the EC Treaties (and their interpretation by the European Court of Justice) and EU Directives (Directive 96/92/EC and Directive 2003/54/EC).

Three major issues emerge on the implementation side: 

• market opening, 
• grid access by new electricity suppliers, 
• the role of national system operators (which play a critical role for coordinating supply and demand and to ensure a genuine partition or « unbundling » between network activities and supply and generation ones)

Even though the liberalisation Directives « refrain from designing a concrete market architecture, » the authors observe similarities between the various member states’ transposition methods, as well as some degree of harmonisation in cross-border access arrangements. Consequently, the KUL research group say « the IEM consists of 25 member states’ submarkets with similar architecture. »

However, the IEM is said to differ from most other liberalised markets worldwide, insofar as it is characterised by « consolidation and re-verticalisation » – the former monopolistic, often state-owned electric industry being replaced by a quasi-oligopolistic European market.

For the IEM to get a « true market architecture, » the authors recommend in the first place to « improve the links between member state submarkets, » which will require extra investments in interconnector transfer capacity, optimal use of the existing network infrastructure and future infrastructure expansions. 

Although not necessary at this stage, the authors argue that more regulation at European-level or at least coordinated regulatory actions will be eventually needed in order to articulate initiatives and remove the technical bottlenecks that currently obstruct the full development of the IEM.