Abstract
The Energy Community and the association of Mediterranean Energy Regulators (MedReg) share an important number of their respective members. The differences in their origins and structure, which will be outlined in the paper, are offset by the commonality of their goal, that is, to push forward the achievement of 'a pan-European energy community', as in [4]. This fact emphasizes the strategic importance of the regulatory framework in the context of developing the EU energy market. A particularly fertile topic in the European literature on regulatory authorities concerns the issue of regulatory independence, but little investigation has been undertaken to explore what regulators actually do and what are their practices across all electricity market segments, that is generation, distribution, transmission and retail. Therefore, the present paper aims at assessing the state-of-the-art of regulatory practice in the electricity sector in the EU and its neighborhood. This is done by analyzing the regulatory competencies and powers of 34 National Regulatory Authorities, representing a comprehensive sample of countries including both the majority of EU member states and several of its neighbors: members of either or both Energy Community and MedReg. © 2013 IEEE.