At a regular meeting on Friday, 20 October, in Brussels the Europex General Assembly elected a new Board, including a new Chairperson, as well as the Heads of the Working Groups for the next two-year mandate, starting from 1 January 2024.
Tom Darell (CEO of Nord Pool) was elected new Chairman and will serve his first term in this role. He succeeds Pieter Schuurs, who will retire from this position by the end of the year.
The General Assembly expressed their special appreciation to Pieter Schuurs who has served in the role of Europex Chairman for the last seven years in addition to being a regular Board member for three additional years before. In this role, he was closely involved in the professionalisation of Europex’ organisation and helped to significantly strengthen Europex’ voice and outreach in European energy, climate and financial services regulation.
The other five elected Board members are Stefano Alaimo (Markets Director at GME), Alexandros Papageorgiou (CEO of HEnEx), Michal Puchel (CEO of OTE), Jonas Törnquist (COO of EPEX SPOT) and Lucas Schmeddes (President & COO of ICE Endex). All Board members will be serving their first terms in their respective roles except for Jonas Törnquist who was re-elected for a third mandate.
The five Working Groups (WGs) will be headed by the following senior experts: 1) Arnold Weiß (Head of EU Regulatory Affairs at EPEX SPOT) for WG Power Markets; 2) Frederick Bernthaler (Head of Legal at CEGH) for WG Gas Markets; 3) Jethro van Hardeveld (Director Regulatory Policy at ICE Endex) for WG Environmental Markets; 4) Anje Stiers (Head of EU Representation Office at EEX) for WG Financial Markets; and 5) Evangelia Papadionysiou (Director, Markets Monitoring & Analysis at HEnEx) for the newly created Working Group on REMIT (WG REMIT).
Christian Baer, Secretary General of Europex, commented: “Tom and the whole new team are experienced leaders in the energy industry and have a deep understanding of European regulation and energy commodity markets. We are glad to see them lead Europex into the next two-year term of the Association which will also mark the beginning of the next mandate of the European Commission and the European Parliament – a period which will be crucial for fine-tuning the right framework conditions in the runup to 2030 and for enabling the market to deliver an energy transition at least cost.”
The General Assembly explicitly thanked the two outgoing Board Members Ahmet Türkoğlu (CEO of EXIST) and Piotr Zawistowski (President of the Management Board of TGE) for their dedicated service on the Europex Board and the constructive contributions both have made to the development of the Association. The members further expressed their sincere gratitude towards Rickard Nilsson (Senior Advisor on Market Design at Nord Pool) for leading the Power Markets Working Group for the last six years and making significant contributions to the European debate on electricity market design.
At their joint meeting, the General Assembly reiterated Europex’ repeated calls for proportionate changes to the Electricity Market Design (EMD) review and the need to preserve the existing well-functioning European short- and long-term power markets. On this occasion, the General Assembly expressed their unanimous support for the deletion of the proposed Single Legal Entity (SLE) for market coupling in the EMD review. The members clearly emphasised that it would put at risk the functioning, operation and further evolution of Single Day-Ahead Coupling (SDAC) and Single Intraday Coupling (SIDC) in Europe while creating a possible single point of failure and all of this without making a positive impact on electricity prices. The Europex General Assembly further cautioned against establishing unnecessary market access barriers for third country firms in the ongoing REMIT review.
