The internal energy market: the EU's response to the energy crisis and its implications

With the burst of conflict in Ukraine, Europe has once again been confronted with the consequences of energy dependence on politically unstable countries with great pull in causing abrupt changes in the prices of energy products. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze European policies in the field of energy from a historical viewpoint, tracing EU action from the European competence in the area examined in the first Chapter to an insightful analysis of the energy packages from the 1990s onward in the second Chapter. The first part will focus precisely on providing the essential information to understand the powers that the EU is able to exercise and then analyze the specific legal basis for the Internal Energy Market, mainly Articles 114, 192 and 194 TFEU and the evolution in their usage. The second part initially deals with the interaction between the Internal Energy Market and the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Treaties, particularly the freedom of movement of goods and the free movement of capital. It then discusses the EU's introduction of sector-specific regulation consisting of the various energy packages, the first three of which focus on liberalizing the energy market, previously partially excluded from the market integration process, through the unbundling method. The end of the second Chapter discusses EU's action in the field of environmental protection, partly achieved through the last two energy packages but also by the European Green Deal and the 2021 Law on Climate, which outline a trajectory of action with the ultimate goal of achieving emissions neutrality by 2050. The third Chapter is devoted to a brief geopolitical analysis of the conflict in Ukraine that arose in early 2022 and the events leading up to it. This is analyzed from the perspective of energy interdependencies that play a key role in Russia-EU relations, in which Russia emerges as one of the largest gas suppliers for the Member States. The economic consequences for the Internal Energy Market were manifold and saw the need for action at the European level that could on the one hand contain the consequences of the energy crisis and on the other hand remain in line with the environmental goals that had already been challenged earlier during the pandemic crisis that hit in 2020.