TIRANA, Oct. 13 – Albania is one of the frontrunners of the Energy Community contracting parties to have transposed the Third Energy Package for electricity and gas into the national legal framework, says the Vienna-based Energy Community.
“Nine months after its transposition deadline in the Energy Community has expired, two Contracting Parties [Albania and Serbia] have fully and Ukraine has partially transposed the Third Energy Package into the national legal framework,” said Janez Kopac, the director of the Energy Community.
“I would like to congratulate these three countries on becoming the frontrunners in that respect. This is a great achievement and a clear indication that the countries are taking their Energy Community obligations seriously,” Kopac added.
The Secretariat’s annual implementation report has also assessed Albania’s progress in implementing the Energy Community acquis communitaire in the period from September 2014 to September 2015, including dedicated chapters on electricity, gas, oil, national regulatory authorities, renewable energy, energy efficiency, environment, competition and statistics.
Since the electricity sector in Albania all but collapsed two years ago, Albania has made great progress in reforming both the legal framework and improving the liquidity of the sector, says the Energy Community, an international organization dealing with energy policy, bringing together the European Union and countries from the South East Europe and the Black Sea region.
“It is now important to continue with the reforms, especially with regard to devising an appropriate support scheme for renewable energy,” suggests the report.
The Community suggests a new renewable energy law needs to improve compliance with the renewable energy acquis. “Support schemes for renewable technologies other than hydropower have to be adopted to tap the renewable energy potential in the country.”
The report also notes the progress in Albania’s Competition Authority which has been very active in investigating competition concerns in the structure of energy markets, but suggests the competition watchdog should “strengthen its enforcement by issuing binding decisions on the violations of competition law and demanding that anticompetitive practices are brought to an end.”
The Vienna Community continues remaining concerned over the independence of energy regulator, ERE.
“Albania’s energy regulatory authority ERE has to live up to the challenge of certifying two transmission system operators in the near future and prove its independence at the same time,” says the report.
Thanks to its huge oil and renewable hydro-electricity production, Albania is one of Europe’s least dependant countries on energy imports, according to a report published by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.
Data shows Albania’s energy dependency, which shows the extent to which an economy relies upon imports to meet its energy needs, was at 25 percent in 2013.
