Ensuring security of electricity supply – who and how ?

Speaker: Inge Pierre, Head of European Affairs, Svensk Energi Swedenergy AB, Chairman of the EURELECTRIC Working group Security of Electricity Supply

Europe has enjoyed a secure electricity supply with very high reliability standards for decades. Indeed, ensuring a reliable electricity supply – without which society today cannot function – must be seen as a high priority for citizens, policymakers and not least for the electricity industry itself. Recently, however, as liberalisation and the creation of a single EU market have changed the environment in which secure electricity supply must continue to be provided, the earlier model of integrated state owned monopoly power-generation and transmission planning has disappeared.

In this changed environment, there have been calls from many sides for clearer definition of electricity market actors’ roles and responsibilities. EURELECTRIC, an association embodying a wide range of producers, transmission and distribution system operators and suppliers, has answered to these calls publishing a discussion paper with the definitions of different aspects of security of electricity supply and defining possible roles and responsibilities of market actors.

Mr. Inge Pierre, chairman of EURELECTRIC’s Working Group on Security of Electricity Supply, outlined the electricity industry’s views on the “who” and “how” of ensuring security of electricity supply.