Companies in the electricity and natural gas industries will have an extra half year to prepare for new EU transaction reporting obligations, as the European Commission is taking longer than expected to list the formats and timetables for the data to be collected.
The EU regulation on energy market integrity and transparency (REMIT) aims to
clamp down on market abuse, including the placing of false orders or misleading the
market on available capacity (see EDEM 29 November 2011).
To allow authorities to monitor their activities for abuse, traders will have to report their wholesale energy transactions to EU-wide body the Agency fo Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER).
REMIT came into force in December 2011 but regulators and EU bodies are still working to put in place the infrastructure needed to enforce it.
Yet Aviv Handler from consultancy ETR Advisory said traders have to prepare for the REMIT reporting requirements now, calling the workload facing energy companies “massive”.
ACER was initially expected to begin collecting trade data and monitoring companies’ compliance by this summer (see EDEM 5 October 2011).
But its start date has been delayed, as the commission is taking longer than expected to flesh out the definitions of the energy contracts to be covered by the reporting obligations and the speed at which companies have to send their deals information to ACER.
The REMIT text states that the commission will draw up a list of the contracts, derivatives and orders to trade that companies have to report and that it will lay down the timing and format for the information.
These definitions, to be set in implementing acts, are now not expected until the end of the year, instead of before June.
The commission has to seek feedback from ACER and energy companies throughout the process, which has caused the delay, ICIS understands.
A consultation on whether the REMIT data reporting obligations should follow standards used in financial regulation is under way and will close on 7 May.
ACER will publish some of the deal data it receives in an aggregated form on a future public platform. Exactly what information will be made public is still undecided.
In a second phase, the public platform will also show data on supply and demand
fundamentals. It will be drawn primarily from the energy market transparency platforms being developed by the EU-wide networks of electricity and gas transmission system operators, ENTSO-E and ENSTOG.
“The idea is that ACER will collect data from the transparency platforms for electricity and gas and merge them in a wider platform, [where] trade information will be included,” a source from ACER told ICIS. The precise timing of the project is yet to be defined.
REMIT already obliges energy companies to publish insider information before they trade. Insider information is any data that would significantly move prices if known, according to REMIT definitions (see EDEM 24 November 2011).