Policy, Regulation & Markets

A tariff methodology, a market rule or an acquis obligation is rarely difficult to draft. It is difficult to make survive.

The same document has to satisfy audiences that do not share a language. A regulator needs a methodology it can defend. A system operator needs a rule that works against the network as it actually is. An investor needs enough predictability to commit capital. A consumer-facing body needs a change it can explain publicly. A framework that satisfies three of those four gets adopted and then quietly fails at the fourth.

That failure is almost never analytical. It is a handoff — between the people who wrote the rule and the people who have to operate under it.

We treat a regulatory question as a chain rather than a document. What does the law actually require? What does that mean in practice? How is it translated into a workable rule? Does it hold when tested against real system and market conditions? Can the affected parties apply it? And what are the lasting rules of operation once the transition period ends?

Each question belongs to a different discipline, and the answer to each constrains the next. Working them in sequence — rather than handing a finished paper to whoever implements it — is the difference between a rule that is adopted and a rule that works.

Because alignment work is judged against the EU acquis and Energy Community obligations, we treat gap analysis as the starting point rather than the deliverable. Knowing where a framework diverges is straightforward. Knowing which divergences matter, in what order, and what each costs to close, is the useful part.