Liberalization in Belgium

The European Union decided to open up the natural gas market to competition. The EU Member States are gradually transposing the European directives to encourage the emergence of a more efficient market. In Belgium, each Region has adopted its own timetable to abide to the legislation.

Principles

The liberalization of the natural gas market in Europe is very much a revolutionary change, the purpose being to encourage free competition. Liberalization has proceeded gradually starting with the directive of 22 June 1998, and then picking up speed with the directive of 26 June 2003, which established the exact dates for opening up the market to business customers (1st July 2004) and residential customers (1st July 2007). The directives form a legal framework, which must be transposed with a certain amount of latitude for assessment in Member States via national laws designed to ensure free access by consumers to the supplier of their choice. Consequently, the business of supplying natural gas is open to competition while the business of distributing gas remains a legal monopoly granted to companies responsible for ensuring that consumers have non-discriminatory access to their services.

In Belgium, the market has been completely liberalized since January 2007.

Why reform?

The liberalization of the gas market is part of a comprehensive approach designed to encourage free competition on energy production and sales market to allow the emergence of a more efficient single European market. It requires the legal separation of the gas production, transmission, distribution and sales businesses. On the liberalized market, customers can freely choose the energy supplier they want: this implies the presence of multiple suppliers using the same transmission and distribution networks.

In Belgium

Since Belgium is a federal state, the European directive has been transposed into national law at the federal and regional levels as they share powers in the area of energy. This explains why the dates on which liberalization took effect for the various categories of consumers differ from one Region to the next (see the table below).