• Client:  EP - ITRE committee
  • Implementation period: April, 2020 - September, 2020 (Completed)
  • Geographic coverage: European Union

Budget and Staffing for the Cooperation of European Regulators

ACER, the Agency for the Cooperation of European Regulators, has suffered for several years of substantial shortages of financial and human resources. It is challenging for ACER to deal with these shortages, and the Agency has had to deprioritise several activities. This is because of a consistently expanding mandate and because of REMIT, the EU wholesale energy markets monitoring system, which has reached a stage where it needs more resources to be fully operational. Failure to have REMIT fully resourced would affect ACER’s capability to reach one of its key objective, namely ensuring integrity and transparency on the wholesale energy market.

This study for the European Parliament evaluates the resources needed for ACER to effectively implement its legislative mandate, both in terms of staff and budget appropriations.

This investigation provided the following preliminary results:

Review of:

  • The evolution of ACER’s mandate since its creation, the Agency’s new responsibilities in view of recent energy policy challenges and the new legislative framework, in particular the ‘Clean Energy for all Europeans’ package, including the revised ACER Regulation;
  • Constraints to budget and staffing in relation to the implementation of the Agency’s legislative mandate;
  • Possible risks associated with a shortage of the Agency’s budget and staffing;
  • Range of increase of budget and staff;
  • To what extent can ACER’s budgetary needs be covered by fees, and whether should fees raised by ACER should impact its budgetary appropriations.