Position paper following the consultation on amendments proposed by ACER to the Capacity Allocation and Congestion Management guidelines

ACER’s proposal for the MCO organisation aims at answering 4 types of shortcomings it identified: slow implementation, difficult regulatory oversight and conflict of interest, risky operational security, and possible absence of MCO services in a region. ACER introduces a solution in which all those tasks are dealt with by a single legal entity.

A critical review of ACER proposal shows that the proposed measures do not address the identified issues:

• Implementation delays due to escalations are a governance issue that can be dealt with without the necessity to create new entities;
• Implementation delays due to lack of resources in the current decentralised organisation will not be solved by the creation of new entities;
• Improvements to the regulatory oversight are partial in terms of costs and absent in terms of accountability;
• Operational security is at risk with entities created ex nihilo whose expertise will take time to reach the required level;
• The continuity of MCO services cannot be cost-effectively ensured through the introduction of a regulated pan-European last resort NEMO.

More generally, ACER’s proposals could imply higher costs of several nature: cost of transition, cost of inefficiencies in operation, cost of higher operational risks.

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