The foundations and problems of regulation of the power industry (part 1)

Regulation and the power industry are two increasingly often associated concepts. The first one means the supervision of the state, the second is one of the most important sectors of the economy. Regulation in the power industry is the reconciliation of the interests of power enterprises with the interest of the receivers who must use energy. Reconciliation of these contradictory interests is quite a task. Its realization is entrusted to the so-called regulator, a specially appointed organ of the state administration with special rights and autonomy. The legal foundations for undertaking actions of this kind in Poland were created by the Energy Law enacted on the 10th April 1997. The article discusses both the questions of the legal-institutional foundations as well as the effects of applying Polish regulation solutions. A special place was taken by tariffing, that is, the use by the regulation organ of the possibility of influencing the establishment of prices in energy enterprises by connecting the price with the cost accepted by the regulator who must also take into consideration also the possibility of making real the payments of the final receivers. In the final part reflections were formulated referring to successes and failures which took place in the process of implementation of the idea of marketization of Polish energy monopolies which served the authors to formulate proposals of changes in the principles of regulation and its tools, which is dealt with in the next part of the article in the third issue of “Ekonomia”.