The European Commission has suggested companies should report standard wholesale gas and electricity transactions daily to EU energy regulatory agency ACER in a consultation paper unveiled late Friday.
The EC is consulting on what should be in the detailed rules needed to implement the reporting requirements in the EU's regulation on energy market integrity and transparency, known as REMIT, which took effect last December.
REMIT is intended to prevent and prohibit market abuse in the EU's wholesale gas and electricity markets. It requires market participants to publish inside information and to report their trades to ACER for monitoring.
The details of how this reporting will work in practice is to be set out in detailed implementing legislation being prepared by the EC.
"Our view is that ACER should focus its market monitoring on those markets where the risk of market abuse is highest and the cost of market abuse to market participants and consumers greatest," the EC said in its paper.
"Market abuse is most likely where standard contracts are used and there is easy access to trading platforms. Consequently, ACER should focus its resources on ensuring that it has access to standard transactions," the EC said.
The EC suggests that all standard trades using organized market places, brokers or trade matching facilities should be reported.
The EC also suggests that where there is a central counterparty it should have sole responsibility for reporting a trade, and where there is no central counterparty, both parties should remain responsible for reporting the trade.
The EC is also seeking feedback on recommendations made by the consultants it commissioned to look at how to implement REMIT's reporting requirements.
The consultants recommended defining a standard commodity transaction as one that can be transformed into a generic REMIT standard reporting format.
They also recommended that ACER set up a list of which transactions are fully reportable. "The...list would include [transactions on] all widely used organized market places, brokers or trade matching facilities and would be subject to periodic update," the EC said.
The consultants recommended that initially all other, non-standard, transactions should be subject to less frequent and less detailed reporting. "Our initial view is that this is a suitable approach towards the specification of the contracts and transactions to be reported," the EC said.
The EC is also seeking feedback on its suggestion that the definition of wholesale gas products extends to LNG and storage, including landing and storage capacity. That would mean companies would have to report their LNG and storage transactions.
REMIT also requires companies to publish fundamental market data. For electricity, the EC is defining such data in detail in draft EU guidelines that it plans to make binding.
But it says there is nothing equivalent in place or planned for gas, and asks for feedback on what fundamental gas data is missing and how it should be accessed.
Interested parties have until December 7 to respond. The consultation paper and consultants' report are available on the EC's website.
