From a procedural point of view, it will be interesting to see how the new structure of the Commission plays out in practice: how will the work be divided between Maroš Šefčovič, Vice President for Energy Union, and Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete? What role will First Vice President Frans Timmermans play? Will the involvement of so many actors lead to more conservative policies, oriented towards the status quo? Or will a dedicated Vice President on energy be able to provide new momentum and give strong impetus to flagship projects such as the newly launched Energy Union? Time will tell, but EU energy policy might become a lot harder to predict.
In any case, any Energy Union project is unthinkable without the EU-wide Internal Energy Market (IEM) as a key pillar. Yet the IEM seems to be a bit like the proverbial fata morgana in the desert: the closer you think you are to reaching it, the further it recedes into the distance. 2014 did see some progress, most notably on day-ahead market coupling, but other areas like intraday market coupling are still lagging behind. Power exchanges and TSOs must work harder in 2015 to overcome the deadlock, if necessary under stronger leadership from ACER and the Commission.
On the climate agenda, 2015 will see the COP21 international climate conference in Paris in December, which the EU will certainly want to use to position itself as a global leader on climate change mitigation. Increasing the EU’s credibility will require strong implementation actions in the run-up to Paris, most notably a strengthening of the EU Emissions Trading System. The planned Market Stability Reserve would be a good first step in this direction, and we have recently witnessed encouraging signs that an adoption in the first quarter of 2015 may be on the cards.
<span '="">Other work ahead may be more difficult to predict. For example, the first quarter of 2015 will probably see the publication of a Communication on retail markets, a paper that was started under the previous Commission and that was delayed while the new Commission reassessed its content. Other issues will undoubtedly crop up unexpectedly: certainly at the beginning of 2014 nobody would have predicted the political crisis between Russia and Ukraine.
In short, 2015 promises to be at least as interesting as 2014.