On 18 March 2005, the Madrid Forum Joint Working Group voluntarily agreed to adopt the Guidelines for Good TPA Practice for Storage System Operators (GGPSSO) in the EU, due to come into force on 1 April 2005. These Guidelines, presented by the European Regulators’ Group for Electricity and Gas (ERGEG), were drawn up following an extensive process of public consultation carried out in order to establish a series of minimum requirements for third-party access (TPA) to gas storage systems in the EU, in accordance with that established in the EU Gas Directive 2003/55/EC concerning common rules for the internal market in natural gas.

This article from Gas Actual reviews the content of these Guidelines, which focus on the following areas of action: role and responsibilities of storage system operators and storage users; necessary TPA services; capacity allocation and congestion management; transparency and confidentiality requirements; tariff structure and derivation; storage penalties; secondary market; and cooperation with transmission system operators. In addition, the authors assess the degree of implementation of these Guidelines by the different Member States of the EU and also identify the areas where the implementation is still insufficient.

Finally, the authors note that these voluntary accepted Guidelines are expected to form the basis of binding regulations governing the conditions of access to gas storage systems in the EU. This would most likely be implemented through a procedure similar to that followed in the gas transmission business (Regulation 1775/2005 on conditions for access to the natural gas transmission networks).

This article was published in Gas Actual, No. 102 (Special issue LNG15), May 2007.