At the beginning of the year BIH took over from Albania the chairmanship of the Energy Community. However at the ministerial council held in Tirana in October 2015, Energy community of South-East Europe introduced sanctions to BIH because of unfulfilled obligations from the Second energy package on gas even though the deadline for the implementation of the Third package expired on January 1, 2015.
As it was published at the official web page of Energy community, this is the first time that the ministerial council introduces sanctions to a member.
According to the decision, the sanctions will be applied in the period of one year. One of the reasons for the introduction of measures for BIH is the omission of the adoption of the Law on gas at the state level in order to establish a unified regulator in the area of gas for the entire BIH.
-We made progress when it comes to electricity and the Law on transmission and regulator of electricity and we can expect to turn this progress into the laws soon which would bring us significantly closer to fulfilling the obligations from the Third energy package – said Mirko Šarović, minister of foreign trade and economic relations of BIH.
Šarović says that there are several processes against BIH initiated by the open letter of the Energy community at the last ministerial conference.
-The processes are related to gas and gas issues in the country, the issues regarding the common document in the area of energy and the issue of not adopting an action plan on renewable energy sources and energy efficiency – Šarović added,
When it comes to gas, the main issue is whether it will be one law on gas at the level of BIH or there will be two entity laws which is more realistic considering that RS now has this law which is fairly harmonized with EU directives.
-Energy community and its Secretariat supports both unified law draft and two identical entity laws, and in the fore coming talks in the next few weeks finally the representatives of Federation and RS will choose one of these options – said Šarović.
With the integration in the Energy community BIH created conditions to trade in energy in the entire region, to draw investments in the electricity and gas network but it takes time to get to more tangible results considering that BIH is still at the beginning of adopting the legislature and business regulations that are already functioning in developed markets, transmits Serbia-energy.eu
