To mark the 25th anniversary of the Association, ERRA conducted a comprehensive mapping exercise of its own membership. A total of 37 ERRA national regulators took part in the mapping survey behind this report — from Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Their responses are mapped across 13 regulatory areas in 5 chapters: from institutional independence and customer protection, through wholesale markets and network tariffs, to renewables, smart metering and electro-mobility. Illustrated by 28 country case studies showcasing real regulatory practice with contributions from two member associations as well, the report treats regulatory diversity not as a gap to close, but as ERRA's distinctive strength.
A Grouping System Built on Diversity, Not a Single Standard
At the heart of the report is a grouping system that classifies members across regulatory groups in each area. As the authors stress, it is a descriptive instrument, not a league table — designed to help understand the challenges ERRA members face and the recommendations they can follow at their particular stage of development, reflecting the practice-based knowledge sharing that has long characterized ERRA's training courses and sectoral benchmarking reports. Rather than benchmarking jurisdictions against a single reference model, it situates each one within a multidimensional landscape in which different configurations may represent legitimate and effective responses to local conditions.
’Across 37 countries and four continents, energy regulators are taking entirely different paths — shaped by different histories, markets and starting points. What this Mapping report shows is that they are all heading toward the same mission: protecting consumers, enabling fair markets, and preparing energy systems for the future. That is ERRA's richness.
Key Findings at a Glance:
- On regulatory independence, 97% of participating ERRA members now hold substantial decision-making autonomy from government, regardless of the size or development stage of their country.
- On multisectoral jurisdiction, ERRA members show no dominant organizational model. About one-third oversee only electricity and/or gas, one-third combine electricity/gas with jurisdiction over other energy segments such as district heating, and fifteen ERRA regulators combine energy oversight with entirely different sectors such as water or waste management — proof that there is no single "right" way to structure a regulatory authority.
- On customer protection, more than four in five ERRA regulators (81.6%) have developed advanced consumer protection capacity, including complaint handling, compensation mechanisms, and alternative dispute resolution — a sign of remarkable maturity across markets of every size and income level.
- On electricity wholesale markets, fully competitive markets now operate in 15 of the 35 surveyed countries, mostly across Europe, while hybrid systems — partly monopolistic, partly open to wholesale markets — are present in a quarter of surveyed countries.
- On household electricity price regimes, prices range from six countries with fully liberalized retail markets to others that maintain regulated, sometimes subsidized prices.
- On network tariff regulatory incentives, 28 of 35 surveyed members (80%) have adopted price-cap or similar mechanisms with at least service-quality incentives.
- On network tariff structure for customers, in most members more than 80% of the network tariff is still recovered through a charge on electricity consumed, though more countries shifting toward a fixed charge.
- On renewable energy, members span IEA integration phases 1 to 4, with 16 already at phase 3, where variable generation materially shapes system operation — and one, Austria, at the highest tier.
- On smart metering, six ERRA countries — Austria, France, Estonia, Latvia, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia — have reached near-universal smart meter coverage, while only 7 of 36 ERRA countries do not yet have smart meters at all.
Why It Matters
ERRA's multiregional membership — spanning the EU single energy market, the transition economies of the Western Balkans and the Caucasus, Gulf regulators in state-led energy systems, Central Asian markets at various stages of reform, and diverse frameworks across Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean — is, in the authors' words, "a distinctive institutional asset." No other association of energy regulators brings together such a structurally diverse membership in one forum for peer learning.
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