Kindly hosted by our Montenegrin member, the Energy Regulatory Agency (REGAGEN) of Montenegro, MEDREG’s 32nd General Assembly meeting took place on 17 November in Kotor, Montenegro.

The Chairs of the different working groups, leading the elaboration and drafting of the various reports, presented to the Assembly the main findings, conclusions, and way forward of their respective reports:

• RES report on the “Energy Efficiency Programs and e-mobility in the Mediterranean region”. The report identifies the role and competences of the regulators in the Mediterranean region with regards to energy efficiency measures and investigates solutions for e-mobility looking at actions taken by the different countries on the matter.
• INS WG report "Study on the interlink between Good Regulatory principles and the energy transformation challenge". In 2020, MEDREG published its Regulatory outlook, which provides a regular update on the status of energy regulation in the Mediterranean Basin. This analysis of the characteristics of each energy regulator may help to categorize some in clusters that have similar characteristics. Based on these clusters, a comparison on the state of development of the energy transformation can be done. Furthermore, this can help identifying the coming challenges for the clusters and depending on the experiences of each regulator, provide some recommendations based on the lesson learnt from the more developed ones.
• GAS WG report "Analysis of gas infrastructure to improve flexibility and interoperability of energy systems". It evaluates the gas infrastructure and its requirement to improve the flexibility and interoperability of the energy system.
• ELE WG report on "Security of Supply". The report introduces the notion of security of supply and the actions that can be taken to ensure it. It showcases the role of the ministry, regulators, and TSO/DSO and producers in terms of security of supply and describes the reasons of outage and outage rates. It also provides indicators for the assessment of security of supply. Overall, it offers a good overview of the situation in the Mediterranean and complements our past publications on this matter.
• ELE WG support activity for PUA “Planning of Distribution Network in Israel”. The scope of the report is to assess the procedure of approving the distribution network plans in the light of the existing mechanisms in the Mediterranean region. The starting point was to develop a benchmark of practices applied in other countries and highlight best practices for developing and monitoring Distribution Network Master and Investments Plans.
• CUS WG report "Role of digitalisation and its impact on consumer issues". The report presents the digital channels and information used by energy regulators as well as by distributors and suppliers. It studies the role of smart technologies, smart meters, and distributed electricity generation in the digitalisation of energy systems. As digitalisation brings more security concerns for cyberattacks, the survey lists the countries that have national strategies related to the security of network and information systems.

The General Assembly members were invited to comment and approve the reports in the following couple of weeks, with view of publishing them in January 2022.

In addition, various planned support activities were presented and discussed. For instance, as a site visit to the Egyptian member GASREG in Cairo is envisaged for the Jordanian member EMRC. EMRC recently became responsible for the regulation of the gas sector and needs support on the design and implementation of regulation on licenses and codes of network.  A study visit of GASREG to the French regulator CRE is also planned in February 2022 on Third Party Access.

Moreover, the technical inputs to the Union for the Mediterranean Energy Platforms were presented followed by the communication and visibility deliverables, as well as recent training activities.

Finally, the General Assembly members were updated on the 2022 Action Plan, which is characterised by a strong focus on regulatory support to members’ needs and by a reinforced cooperation with our partner MED-TSO.