CEER Conference on Building a 2020 vision for Europe's energy customers, 21 June 2012 - Brussels
CEER Conference on Building a 2020 vision for Europe's energy customers, 21 June 2012 - Brussels
The Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) invites you to an interactive customer conference in Brussels, during Sustainable Energy Week, on Thursday 21st June 2012. The event is organised with the cooperation of the European Commission (DG ENER and DG SANCO).
A pioneering approach by energy regulators to place customers at the heart of EU policy
Energy regulators are developing a future vision of how best to meet energy customers’ needs and wants, based on a bottom-up approach of listening to customers. It aligns well with the EU’s new Consumer Agenda and the Third Package of energy liberalisations legislation.
This interactive conference with national customer bodies is the first stage of a process, led by the regulators, to identify and explore the many challenges that energy customers face now and in the future. CEER recognises the importance of working with other partners, particularly consumer organisations, in order to develop the 2020 vision. We hope that our initiative of developing a future vision for energy customers which meets energy customers needs and wishes could be a role model for other sectors.
What will be discussed at CEER’s energy customer event?
Priort to attending the event, participants are encouraged to read the CEER discussion paper “2020 vision for Europe’s energy customers (also available in other languages under the Discussion Paper tab)”. This vision paper asks what customers want from the energy market, what are their priorities and what are the future challenges and opportunities. During the event there will be four interactive break-out sessions on the key areas of the vision:
Break-out A: Affordability What are the drivers of reliability?
Break-out B: Knowing your rights: tools for protection and empowerment.
Break-out C: What are the drivers of reliability?
Break-out D: Finding simplicity amongst the diversity of competition
Who should attend this workshop?
The target audience is the representative national consumer organisations as well as small businesses, civil society, representatives from the Institutions and the energy and heating industry.
Languages
During the event, simultaneous translation will be provided in 6 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish. The discussion paper and the conference programme is provided in number of different languages (under the discussion paper tab and the programme tab respectively).
Interested in sharing a testimonial and your novel solutions at the workshop?
Four national consumer bodies will have the chance to tell their story (in a short 10 minute testimonial) of their consumer insight and successful energy consumer empowerment in their country.
Should you be interested in such a testimonial, please let us know as soon as possible, and in any event by 26th May the name and contact details of the person who will presenting, and provide a short (max 1 page) abstract of your success story. Such requests should be submitted to this mailbox only: energycustomers@ceer.eu indicating “Testimonial” in the subject of the e-mail. We shall confirm those consumer bodies selected for a speaker slot by Thursday, 31st May at the latest.
In addition, given the interactive nature of the conference, the break-out sessions will provide opportunities for all participants to share their novel solutions to the future challenges we face and feed into this process of developing a 2020 Vision.
Multi-lingual versions of the invitation can be found below (BG, CZ, DE, ES, FR, IT, NL, PT, SK and SV)
Deadline for sending comments to the discussion paper: 16 July 2012.
Comments should be sent to energycustomers@ceer.eu
The Third Energy Legislative Package gives national regulatory authorities (NRAs) significant responsibilities for protecting and empowering customers, whilst EU legislation provides a series of tools with the objective of facilitating choice, fair prices and the protection of customers participating in energy markets. The years to 2020 will bring many challenges including the achievement of the EU’s environmental targets for that year.
The Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) now launches the first stage of its process which will confront and overcome the many challenges that customers face now and in the future. That process begins with an interactive conference on Thursday, 21 June 2012 shortly after the European Commission’s Consumer Agenda Summit on 29 May (Annex 1 provides the provisional agenda of the CEER event). The conference will involve consumers, industry and institutional representatives, who will consider CEER’s initial thinking. A formal strategy document and work programme with concrete actions will be presented at the Citizens’ Energy Forum in November 2012 in London.
CEER will then organise initial reviews in 2013 and 2014 at the annual Forum to monitor and review progress towards the 2020 strategic objective. Thereafter, as part of its vision to 2020, CEER will continue actively to assess the progress made and future policy actions in the light of future developments.
To stimulate contributions in the interactive conference, the CEER discussion paper 2020 vision for Europe’s energy customers provides as a basis for discussion some preliminary answers to a series of questions:
- What do customers want from the energy market – and what are their priorities?
- What are the future changes – challenges and opportunities – that customers will face?
- How should these be addressed? What good and bad practices already exist in your region that can be shared? Do you have novel ideas on how to address these issues going forward?
- Are the concrete actions we envisage adequate to facilitate discussion and awareness of the development of EU energy policy? What other initiatives could be helpful?
Discussions around these questions will help us to refine our thinking which will then be incorporated into a more comprehensive document for the Forum on 13-14 November 2012 where broad support from participants will be sought. In addition to these discussions, the present paper also offers the opportunity for those unable to attend that event to provide written observations.
The deadline for comments is 16 July and these can be sent to: