| 摘要 | ��
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1. Research Purpose
This paper tried to investigate a current energy market environment, followed by providing necessity of reorganizing regulatory governance to enhance energy sector's competitiveness. This research can contribute to provide a way to implement more efficient regulatory governance for future energy industry and market.
2. Summary
Energy industry has been experiencing tremendous changes in terms of business environment. First of all, oil prices soared up by over 100$ per barrel. It directly damages energy company's revenue. Besides, a conflicts of interest has been created in energy sectors. It is mostly due to the business diversification of incumbent companies in the energy market.
Gas companies attempt to enter the new business areas like electricity or district heating. District heating companies are also looking for electricity business opportunities Furthermore, housing or construction companies are already advanced into the energy supply sector, referring as CES(Community Energy Service) provider. The CES provider supplies heat and power altogether to customers in the designated service area. As of December 2008, 28 service areas were already obtained business licences, and three of them is operating now.
Turning to overseas energy industries, M&A between gas company and electricity company can be easily found out in and out of domestic market. E.ON, German utility company, had attempted to acquire Endesa, Spanish utility company. However, the winning bid for Endesa finally turned out to be Enel(Italian utility company) and Acciona(Spanish company) in 2007. It is noted that as competition in the energy market intensifies, so the number of M&A will increase.
Facing number of integration of gas and electricity companies, in the meantime, regulatory governance for competitive energy sector might be reorganized to implement regulatory function efficiently. For instance, OFFER(Office of Electricity Regulation) and OFGAS(Office of Gas Regulation) were merged into a single regulator, OFGEM(Office of Gas and Electricity Markets) in UK.
3. Research Results and Policy Suggestions
The lessons from the foreign energy sectors played an important role to withdraw implementable policy suggestions for establishing a new regulatory framework. Major findings of this paper focusing on rearranging regulatory governance are summarized as the followings.
First, regulatory framework should be established based upon autonomy and independence principal. Even though energy regulatory body is under its own policy-making sector, independence could be guaranteed in the open and transparent process of regulation.
Second, it should be necessary for a newly designed relationship between regulatory body and policy-making body. A conflict of interest between two parties rises quite often in establishing and implementing energy policies. For example, an industry policy could be set up to protect certain industry through keeping prices low. But regulatory body intends to maintain a reasonable price level against policy-making body. Generally, the policy-making body concerns about inflation.
Third, the regulation by functions- licensing, pricing, market surveillance, and consumer protection - is better than regulation by energy sources in several aspects. The former is less likely to be exposed with risks of regulatory capture. It could be easily modified according to sudden changes of business environment. It also has advantage of controlling problems across sectors.
Fourth, an independent energy regulatory body should be needed in the near future. An easiest way to build such a body is to enlarge KOREC(Korea Electricity Regulatory Commission) toward energy regulatory body. Therefore, this paper presents a basic idea about how to organize energy regulatory body.
In the end, government's role over energy market should be changed. Liberalization and deregulation of energy market has been occurred all over the world. We have to implement restructuring and privatization of energy industry. In this context, the role of government might be changed to focus on market failure evasion, long-term energy security, reasonable energy mix, and so on. Regarding regulation for energy sector, government should focus on playing level field and improving industry competitiveness.
106 pages, 56 refs., 12 tabs., 15 Figs., Language: Korean |
