This book explores the important economic and legal questions of market manipulation that have arisen in restructured energy markets, paying particular attention to the actions of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

"This paper first describes those features of the electricity supply industry that make a prospective market monitoring process essential to a well-functioning wholesale market. Some of these features are shared with the securities industry, although the technology of electricity production and delivery make a reliable transmission network a necessary condition for an efficient wholesale market. These features of the electricity supply industry also make antitrust or competition law alone an inadequate foundation for an electricity market monitoring process.

In the course of energy liberalisation, electricity and natural gas contracts have been separated from physical delivery, and these contracts are now traded as commodities in multilateral trading facilities. Although designed to render energy trading standardised and efficient, this system raises serious questions as to whether existing regulatory and antitrust provisions are sufficient to address market abuses that cause imbalances in demand and supply. The European Union’s (EU’s) Regulation on Wholesale Energy Market Integrity and Transparency (REMIT), adopted to combat such market manipulation, is still lacking in significant case law to bolster its effectiveness. Addressing this gap, this invaluable book provides the first in-depth analysis of market manipulation in the energy sector, offering a deeply informed understanding of the new anti-manipulation rules and their implementation and enforcement. Focusing on practices that perpetrators employ to manipulate electricity and natural gas markets and the applicability of anti-manipulation rules to combat such practices, the analysis examines such issues and topics as the following: – factors and circumstances that determine when and what market misconduct can be subject to enforcement; – the European Commission’s criteria to determine whether a particular market is susceptible to regulation; – jurisdiction of REMIT and the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) with respect to the prohibitions of insider trading in financial wholesale energy markets; – to what extent anti-manipulation rules and EU competition law may be applied concurrently; and – types of physical and financial instruments that market participants have employed in devising their manipulative schemes. Because market manipulation is rather new in the EU context but has been prohibited and prosecuted under US law for over a century, much of the case law analysis is from the United States and greatly clarifies how anti-manipulation rules may be enforced. A concluding chapter offers policy recommendations to mitigate legal uncertainties arising from REMIT. Energy market participants, such as energy producers, wholesale suppliers, traders, transmission system operators and their counsel, and legal practitioners in the field will welcome this book’s extensive legal analysis and its clear demarcation of the objectives that REMIT seeks to accomplish with respect to energy market liberalisation.

Traditionally, American energy markets have been regulated using a combination of antitrust law and public utility law: the former has predominated in oil markets and the latter in markets for natural gas and electricity. Over time, energy markets have grown increasingly complex and competitive, due partly to changing market conditions (for example, in oil markets) and partly to the regulation (in natural gas and electricity markets). Increasingly competitive energy markets meant increased risk for energy companies, who turned to energy derivatives as a way to hedge that risk. High energy prices and charges of manipulation in 21st-century energy markets have led regulators to a new approach, one that borrows from securities regulation and focuses attention and "manipulation and deceit" by energy market participants. However, the securities model may be a bad fit for energy markets, because reliance on this new approach exposes consumers to price risks associated with the exercise of market power by sellers, risks to which they were not subject under traditional approaches to regulation. Specifically, the securities regulation model overlooks important ways in which sellers can exert market power at the expense of consumers in the absence of fraud or deceit, partly because of the way securities case law interprets "manipulation," and partly because some of the common assumptions regulators employ about the ways in which market participants respond to price changes do not apply, or apply only weakly, in some energy markets. We explore the origins of these "bad fit" problems, and their implications, in this article.

Featuring an original introduction by the editors, these carefully-selected essays explore the main issues surrounding competition and regulation in electricity markets. The industry is experiencing irresistible forces of change, driven by energy policy objectives; a reassessment of market regulation in the face of high-energy prices; and the response to consumer pressure to agree on what constitutes a fair price for energy. This volume identifies the key articles that underpin the debate across the industries supply chain (generation, supply and networks) from a regulatory perspective (including market power and incentive regulation). The collection then considers the overall impact of liberalisation and future developments.