About the webinar:
Capacity mechanisms are conceptualized as regulatory instruments aimed at ensuring the adequacy of electricity supply by remunerating the availability of generation capacity or other resources capable of contributing to security of supply. They address persistent concerns that energy-only markets may fail to provide adequate investment signals to maintain sufficient capacity, particularly to meet peak demand and ensure long-term system reliability. Given the potential for uncoordinated capacity mechanisms to distort the internal electricity market and to conflict with Union rules on state aid and market integration, the Clean Energy Package introduced a comprehensive legal framework designed to ensure that such mechanisms are proportionate, necessary, and consistent with Union law.
A key development in this regard is the Electricity Market Design (EMD) reform adopted in 2024 (Regulation (EU) 2024/1747), which marked a conceptual shift by recognising that capacity mechanisms should no longer be viewed exclusively as measures of last resort. Rather, they may play a critical role in ensuring resource adequacy, particularly during the transition to a carbon-neutral energy system and in structurally constrained or insufficiently interconnected markets. Moreover, the procedural requirements for implementing capacity mechanisms have proven complex and burdensome. The EMD reform accordingly calls for an evaluation of how the application process could be streamlined and simplified to improve legal clarity and administrative efficiency.
Speaker
Assistant Professor Martin Švec, Head of the Department of Energy Law and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law and Technology at the Faculty of Law of the Masaryk University (Czech Republic)
Moderator
Prof. Catherine Banet, Department for Energy and Resources Law, University of Oslo
Digital resources from the webinar:
