Regulation 2019/943 - Internal market for electricity (recast) - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 158/54

Regulation (EC) No 714/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council (4) has been substantially amended several times. Since further amendments are to be made, that Regulation should be recast in the interests of clarity.

The Energy Union aims to provide final customers – household and business – with safe, secure, sustainable, competitive and affordable energy. Historically, the electricity system was dominated by vertically integrated, often publicly owned, monopolies with large centralised nuclear or fossil fuel power plants. The internal market for electricity, which has been progressively implemented since 1999, aims to deliver a real choice for all consumers in the Union new business opportunities and more cross-border trade, so as to achieve efficiency gains, competitive prices and higher standards of service, and to contribute to security of supply and sustainability. The internal market for electricity has increased competition, in particular at the wholesale level, and cross-zonal trade. It remains the foundation of an efficient energy market.

The Union's energy system is in the middle of its most profound change in decades and the electricity market is at the heart of that change. The common goal of decarbonising the energy system creates new opportunities and challenges for market participants. At the same time, technological developments allow for new forms of consumer participation and cross-border cooperation.

This Regulation establishes rules to ensure the functioning of the internal market for electricity and includes requirements related to the development of renewable forms of energy and environmental policy, in particular specific rules for certain types of renewable power-generating facilities, concerning balancing responsibility, dispatch and redispatching, as well as a threshold for CO2 emissions of new generation capacity where such capacity is subject to temporary measures to ensure the necessary level of resource adequacy, namely, capacity mechanisms.

Electricity from renewable sources from small power-generating facilities should be granted priority dispatch either via a specific priority order in the dispatching methodology or via legal or regulatory requirements for market operators to provide this electricity on the market. Priority dispatch which has been granted in the system operation services under the same economic conditions should be considered to comply with this Regulation. In any case, priority dispatch should be deemed to be compatible with the participation in the electricity market of power-generating facilities using renewable energy sources.

State interventions, often designed in an uncoordinated manner, have led to increasing distortions of the wholesale electricity market, with negative consequences for investments and cross-border trade.

In the past, electricity customers were purely passive, often buying electricity at regulated prices which had no direct relation to the market. In the...