At CEER, we seek to embed our commitment to transparency in a number of ways. This month we were honoured, in winning the Energy Transparency Award 2011, for our efforts in promoting transparency. CEER is the winner of the Energy Transparency Award (2011) The Energy Transparency Award (ETA) is an annual competition that recognises a company or institution for their particular contribution to the transparency of energy markets in Europe. CEER won the award for our contribution to the conception and implementation of a transparency regulation at European scale (see photos and video of the awards ceremony on 10 November). The award honours our work on a Pilot Project Energy Trade Data Reporting Scheme (which could safeguard market integrity and help prevent market abuse) and our pro-active work on setting the right overall legislative proposals. The ETA Steering Committee praised CEER for having "initiated a close and productive dialogue with financial market regulators many years ago aimed at providing comprehensive and coherent supervision and regulation of all energy markets, physical and financial". This ERGEG/CESR advice contributed greatly to the Regulation on Energy Market Integrity and Transparency (REMIT), adopted in October, 2011. REMIT creates a framework for protecting energy trading from market manipulation and insider dealing. The pilot project serves as a prototype for implementaion of REMIT and, according to ACER Director, Alberto Pototschnig "is a major input to ACER..for monitoring trading activities and the detection of market abuse required under the new REMIT legislation." Trading licences – harmonising rules At the European Commission’s request, CEER has examined whether there is a need to harmonise the licencing regimes for wholesale energy trading within the EU. This month, we published our conclusions paper, and evaluation of responses, to our public consultation. In our final advice to the Commission, we conclude that a Europe-wide Energy Wholesale Trading Passport would be the best policy option to overcome the existing shortcomings of the regulatory regime (as all other options have deficits). The big benefit of the proposed Europe-wide Energy Wholesale Trading Passport would be that each trading company would need to apply for such a passport only once in one EU Member State and could then use this passport in all European wholesale energy markets. Our recommendations take into account the developments in this field through REMIT Regulatory oversight of energy exchanges Also this month, we concluded our consultation on the regulatory oversight of energy exchanges. Whilst regulatory oversight of energy derivatives exchanges is harmonised through minimum standard requirements (through MiFID) at European level, regulatory oversight of energy spot exchanges currently differs in the EU Member States due to a lack of European minimum standards and different national legislative requirements. In the interest of greater EU market integration and market integrity, we examined best practice supervision of energy exchanges. Our final advice to the European Commission includes recommendations for all models of energy exchanges, without aiming at harmonising the existing models of energy exchanges or influencing the ownership structure of energy exchanges. The sole focus of this advice is the regulatory oversight of energy exchanges. It aims at complementing the regulatory framework that will be introduced with REMIT for energy exchanges. |