El derecho eléctrico español en el proceso de creación del mercado interior de la electricidad de la unión europea

Abstract

Energy is an essential economic sector. Its modern legal regulation, in the Member States of the European Union, contributes to the principles and evolution of European Law and its necessary degree of incardination on a national level. The regulation foundations, principles and techniques that result from Community law have constituted the components of the transformation of the Spanish electric power law, primarily through the development of its community standards which define the process of creating the internal energy market, in its electrical aspect. The European law foundations are expressed in the Primary law that explains the bases of its creation and harbors its guiding principles in the economic order, with the freedoms of movement that incorporate the community integration process, and also the essential European jurisprudence for the shaping of the European law. Since the adoption of the Single European Act, liberalization packages or the aperture to the sectorial competition of strategic fields like the power industry, set up until substantially modifying the national energy rights harmonizing them in principles and techniques at European scale. The main axis of this plan is the freedom of entrance and exit into the sector, the public and universal service commitments incorporated in the framework and as part of the general interest economic services, community expression of the economic public service modern delimitation due to its focus on free competition; the access of third party operators to the power lines and infrastructures of which they are not either owners or holders, and the division of industrial and commercial activities for regulation and transparency reasons. All this is gathered and developed gradually in the national legal system framework and, in the case of Spain, it constitutes the basis for the creation, implementation and performance of a new Electric Power Law. This essay reviews the European law foundations and its impact in electric regulation, but especially highlights the elements that have defined and allowed to progress the internal energy market...