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Market monitoring

Why market monitoring? First, the Third Energy Package tasks the Agency with monitoring the internal markets for electricity and gas. To this purpose, the Agency prepares an annual market monitoring report in close cooperation with the European Commission, National Regulatory Authorities and other relevant organisations. The legal basis for the Agency’s market monitoring duties is in Article 11 of Regulation (EC) No. 713/2009. 

Moreover, the objective of the Agency’s market monitoring activities is to explain how energy markets can perform more efficiently, thus making energy more affordable to the benefit of European energy consumers. For example, if barriers to market integration of the internal electricity and gas markets are removed, then the level of competition should improve.  

The fourth edition of the Agency’s Market Monitoring Report presented in 2015 shows that wholesale energy prices continued to decrease in 2014 and that this fall had a positive impact on the prices paid by industrial consumers, but often not on the energy bills of residential customers. 

The third edition of the Agency’s Market Monitoring Report presented in 2014 assesses in-depth retail market competition in different markets across the EU, with a view to identifying instances of best practice which improve market performance. Moreover this edition reports the findings of two dedicated reports commissioned by the Agency, on i) Barriers to cross-border entry into retail energy markets and ii) on Demand-Side Flexibility in the EU. This edition also tracks the progress made in removing remaining barriers to the functioning of the Internal Energy Market based on a range of standard indicators which were introduced in previous editions of the Market Monitoring Report.

The Market Monitoring Report 2013 pointed out to strong incumbents' role in the majority of the European countries and still prevailing end-user price regulation. The first edition of the Market Monitoring Report in 2012 assessed the internal markets for energy and, in particular, concentrated on retail prices (including compliance with consumer rights as mentioned in the Third Package), network access (including grid access for renewable energy sources), and on barriers to the Internal Energy Market.

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