ACHIEVING A COMPETITIVE EUROPEAN GAS MARKET GIE annual conference Athens 3-4 November 2005 Maria Rehbinder EUROPEAN COMMISSION DG COMPETITION All views expressed are purely personal and cannot, under any circumstances, be considered as an official position of the European Commission

2 IMPROVING COMPETITION – HOW?  Implementing existing EU legislation  Form and content  Role of regulators  Adressing remaining problems:  Internal energy market progress report  Competition Sector inquiry

3 COMPETITION SECTOR INQUIRY  Competition investigation (reg. 1/2003)  Prompted by indicators of market malfunctioning  Rising prices  Customer complaints  Focus on wholesale markets  Investigating  Market and competition conditions

4 ROLE OF INFRASTRUCTURE  Infrastructure central  Continues to be:  important bottleneck and key obstacle for potential competitors  Sector inquiry focus on  ‘transit lines”  storage  Other entry barriers!  access to gas  access to customers

5 SECTOR INQUIRY FINDINGS  Preliminary findings  Reinforce analysis in the Internal Energy market Progress Report  Discussion NCA:s and NRA:s  Preliminary report  Consultation all stakeholders beginning of 2006  Final report in 2006

6 Need for progress Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.  Plato Greek author & philosopher in Athens (427 BC BC) Plato