CEER - 2020 Vision for Europe's Energy Customers - a Discussion paper
The Third Energy Legislative Package gives national regulatory authorities (NRAs) significant responsibilities for protecting and empowering customers, whilst EU legislation provides a series of tools with the objective of facilitating choice, fair prices and the protection of customers participating in energy markets. The years to 2020 will bring many challenges including the achievement of the EU’s environmental targets for that year.The Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) now launches the first stage of its process which will confront and overcome the many challenges that customers face now and in the future. That process begins with an interactive conference on Thursday, 21 June 2012 shortly after the European Commission’s Consumer Agenda Summit on 29 May (Annex 1 provides the provisional agenda of the CEER event). The conference will involve consumers, industry and institutional representatives, who will consider CEER’s initial thinking. A formal strategy document and work programme with concrete actions will be presented at the Citizens’ Energy Forum in November 2012 in London.CEER will then organise initial reviews in 2013 and 2014 at the annual Forum to monitor and review progress towards the 2020 strategic objective. Thereafter, as part of its vision to 2020, CEER will continue actively to assess the progress made and future policy actions in the light of future developments.To stimulate contributions in the interactive conference, the CEER discussion paper 2020 vision for Europe’s energy customers provides as a basis for discussion some preliminary answers to a series of questions:- What do customers want from the energy market – and what are their priorities?- What are the future changes – challenges and opportunities – that customers will face?- How should these be addressed? What good and bad practices already exist in your region that can be shared? Do you have novel ideas on how to address these issues going forward?- Are the concrete actions we envisage adequate to facilitate discussion and awareness of the development of EU energy policy? What other initiatives could be helpful?Discussions around these questions will help us to refine our thinking which will then be incorporated into a more comprehensive document for the Forum on 13-14 November 2012 where broad support from participants will be sought. In addition to these discussions, the present paper also offers the opportunity for those unable to attend that event to provide written observations.