REMIT and REMIT II Regulation in the Energy Sector

With EU electricity prices rising by 36% in the five-year period between 2019 and 2024, many households are feeling the strain. REMIT is the regulation designed to maintain competition and fairness in the energy markets, ensuring that the prices consumers pay reflect genuine supply and demand.

Understanding how this regulation works to prevent the manipulation or misuse of privileged information matters for anyone exposed to the European and UK energy markets.

What is REMIT?

REMIT stands for Regulation on Wholesale Energy Market Integrity and Transparency. It’s the EU’s framework for preventing insider trading and market manipulation for the energy market, promoting fairness, transparency and market integrity. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it mirrors regulation in the financial markets.

Introduced in 2011, REMIT applies to all energy market participants, including:

• Energy producers/ generators: gas extractors or energy creators
• Suppliers / traders: those buying or selling wholesale energy
• Transmission and distributor operators: those managing grid networks

Household consumers, as well as those trading outside of the EU and UK are not subject to these rules. Agency for the Co-operation of Energy Rules (ACER), is the decentralized agency enforcing the rules

Key obligations

The original REMIT framework rests on four pillars: don’t trade on inside information, don’t manipulate the market, disclose inside information you hold, and register and report your trading activity to ACER. Here is some more detail on the key obligations:

Obligation	Details
Registration	Must register with national authority on a publicly accessible list and subsequent central register on ACER.
Inside information	Prohibited from using insider information to trade and must disclose if such information (such as price sensitive data) is used.
Market abuse	Prohibited to attempt market manipulation, and persons professionally arranging transactions (PPATs) are legally obliged to report suspicious transactions.
Transaction records	Records of transfers, trade orders and fundamental market data must be sent to ACER, completely and securely through registered reporting mechanisms.

Why was REMIT II introduced?

In 2021 and 2022, the energy markets experienced significant turbulence. Factors like geopolitics, a spike in demand post-COVID, and a general reduction in gas supplies all led to energy prices spiking.

In 2023, REMIT was, therefore, reviewed and amendments were proposed in order to crack down on market manipulation. The changes were officially adopted in May 2024.

What are the main differences between REMIT and REMIT II?

There are two major updates that REMIT II brought.

1. Increase transparency and more closely monitor the capacity of energy market players
2. Increase the effectiveness of investigation and enforcement action when abuse is detected

These changes grew the role of ACER, expanding it’s powers to oversee:

• Inspections
• Information requests
• The authorization of Inside Information Platforms
• The authorization of Registered Reporting Mechanisms

Due to this expansion, the sanctions are also applied more uniformly across member states, closing the previous enforcement action gaps that varied by jurisdiction. 

As well as expansion, REMIT II included the direct introduction of algorithmic trading monitoring and moved the legal obligation for trade reporting away from individual participants and to the organizations themselves. 

How to maintain your ongoing compliance?

Compliance with REMIT II became officially enforceable in the first quarter of 2026 and requires the complete tracking and monitoring of employee communications. Without fixed materiality thresholds, firms must make their own judgment on what needs disclosing and when. Setting your firm up with automated transaction reporting at least gives you a real-time basis to work from, regardless of the volume of information passing through.

With the move into algorithmic trade reporting, firms should be prepared to oversee, record and report more data, and introduce more automation to handle the increased workload.

Take control of your electronic communications data

Global Relay provides a single repository for 100+ data types, enabling energy participants to replace inefficient record gathering with productivity. With live capture of all electronic communications and advanced analytics, Global Relay helps you to find patterns and information that might otherwise be missed or discovered too late.

Enable your litigation team to respond to regulatory requests efficiently. Take advantage of high-speed search, eDiscovery and data export. Automatically preserve and hold your records while cutting operational expenditure.

Learn more about Global Relay’s energy solutions.