Regional dimensions to Europe’s energy integration
The European Commission initially encouraged regional groupings as the bottom-up building blocks of energy market integration, at a time when, in the mid-2000s, no further EU-wide energy legislation seemed possible. But, once the Third Package was passed in 2009, the Commission decided to rush the market integration process by means of top-down centralised harmonisation. This paper argues it is neither feasible nor desirable to try to leap-frog the regional phase of energy market integration…