As in previous years, the document is structured according the format of the Programming Document for EU Agencies. The Agency’s multiannual outlook for the 2018 – 2020 period has been updated, but remains fully consistent with the one published last year. Pending the adoption and the entry into force of the legislative acts of the Commission’s “Clean Energy for all Europeans” package, the Agency’s legal mandate and priorities remain, for the time-being, the same as those in 2017.
The document thus focuses on the four main areas on which the Agency expects to concentrate its activities: the (post-2014) completion of the Internal Energy Market, the infrastructure challenge, the monitoring of wholesale energy markets and the longer-term regulatory challenges such as the integration of renewables. As an innovation with respect to previous years, however, the tasks in the 2018 Work Programme have been classified according to three priority levels (critical, important and relevant).
As in 2017, the monitoring of trading in EU wholesale energy markets on the basis of the reported trade and fundamental data remains one of the Agency’s main challenges. The Agency’s effectiveness in such a monitoring activity continues to depend crucially on it being assigned the significant additional resources that it has been requesting since 2014, and which the Agency is again requesting for 2018.
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