The liberalisation of European electricity and gas markets initiated in February 1996 leads to major structural changes in the energy industry. The competition now developing prompts firms in a at once challenging and promising way. The formerly monopolistic supply firms now find themselves in the midst of national and international competition, requiring the continued improvement of their production, demand, supply and marketing activities. The establishment of new purchasing and distribution channels, the at times rather aggressive marketing and pricing strategies as well as the restructuring of the firms have clearly become part of the industry´s market. Firms are in the midst of an aggressively led struggle for market shares. Here the concern arises that the effects of liberalisation may impede progress with respect to climate policy goals, either because a lack of factoring in environmental external ffects, or because of the apparent lack of straighforward returns on the side of newly developed alternative energies.

Against this background the model experiment (hosted on the FEES web page) is to employ existing models in order to determine the role of environmnetal and climate protection on liberalised energy markets using harmonised case studies.