Concluding Remarks and Recommendations

There is a manifest need to secure the European Critical Electricity Infrastructure. Our analysis of the ECEI system and its dynamic behaviour inevitably led to the conclusion that the reliability and quality of electricity service provision to the European citizen are not adequately secured if all actors are allowed to run their activities at subsystem levels in the “old ways” of the pre-liberalisation era. The established lack of supply security applies to the short term as well as to the long term security of electricity service provision. There are multiple reasons for this conclusion: the emerging European Critical Electricity Infrastructure (ECEI) – including the European electricity market – is a fundamentally different construct from the old situation of interconnected national grids. Even if the latter situation seems comparable with the current ECEI in terms of geographical scale and scope, the complexity of the ECEI is beyond comparison, as it reaches far beyond physical network complexity. With the liberalisation process, many new players have entered the playing field, new roles have been introduced, the rules of the game have changed and are still changing. The complexity of the multi-actor network is unprecedented, and its behaviour is highly unpredictable. On the one side, this unpredictability is a consequence of the multitude of actors involved, our lack of insight in their intentional relationships, their strategic behaviour and learning behaviour. On the other side, the evolution of the multi-actor network and the socio-economic subsystem in which it is embedded are subject to many uncertainties pertaining to market development and evolving regulation, technological innovation and institutional change. Given our lack of experience with liberalised electricity markets in Europe, it is evident that we are not able to identify all the risks that are generated by the dynamic interactions between the physical and socio-economic subsystems that constitute the ECEI.