EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

sector could be taken for granted, long-term grid blackouts (i.e., even a few days) and inability to use stable energy sources can lead to significant social damage and harm to the population. One example of this could be seen in the power crisis in the US state of Texas in February 2021. This showed how severe the consequences of a lack of sufficient energy (and its high pricing) could be for households, communities and/or businesses. This is notwithstanding the impact on price stability, where energy prices – as part of the consumer basket – contribute to overall inflation (European Commission, 2021a) and the prosperity of those who are vulnerable to energy poverty. 2. Problem Formulation and Methodology The methodological basis of the study are the legal methods of the scientific knowledge. As the main method of this article, I first chose the analytical method, which will be partially supplemented by the descriptive method. Furthermore, I will also examine energy security and its legal foundations, partly from the perspective of social systems theory (law as a social phenomenon), as stated by Josef Požár – a) dynamism (changing of the law, including the soft law, over time) and b) complexity (legal and factual consequences of different information, including information asymmetry). (Požár, 2003, p. 27) The purpose of regulation is to ensure, through a change of law, that the behaviour of those being regulated (persons, entities) changes in the future. In other words, as Hans Kelsen states: A legislator enacts norms only because he believes that these norms, as motives in the mind of man, are capable of inducing the latter to the behavior desired by the legislator. (Kelsen, 1943, p. 391) Themain question is how the law regarding the proposed and current decarbonisation legislation will transform, especially regarding decarbonisation in the energy sector. The thesis of this paper is that decarbonisation policy will have an impact on current and future energy projects, including the regulation of legal aspects. 3. Analysis and Problem Solution The so-called “energy mix”, which, in compliance with Article 194(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, refers to the “Member State’s right to determine the conditions for exploiting its energy resources, its choice between different energy sources and the general structure of its energy supply” (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, 2012) is, in my opinion, it is similar to the term “diversification”, which is usually used in the financial

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