Completing the internal market in energy to ensure that European businesses can compete with their US and Japanese counterparts has so far focused on liberalising the internal market through legislation. As the old monopoly structures are dismantled, liberalising the energy markets will depend on rigorously applying the competition rules of the EC treaty to prevent barriers being maintained through actions of market participants.
At the beginning of December, the European Commission (EC) published a first report on the implementation of the internal electricity and gas market. Its review led it to conclude that clear questions were raised as to whether partial market opening, and the limited structural reforms envisaged in the current directives, are working satisfactorily towards a real competitive internal market, even for the large users of energy that are eligible to choose supplier.
