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A noticeable tendency from the last few years has been the lower and lower capacity utilisation of the Hungarian natural gas storage facilities at the beginning of the withdrawal period. Even though the volume of gas withdrawn from the storage sites to satisfy the demand of winter months has essentially not changed (around 34-37%), the utilisation rate of the capacity of domestic facilities fell from almost 100% in early October 2009 to 50% by October 2012. In absolute terms, nevertheless, there was 3 bcm of natural gas in non-strategic storage facilities, the same order of magnitude as the 2009 inventory. In our article we seek to explore the processes that are behind the severe decline of the utilisation of storage space

At the end of the year the Official Journal of the European Union will publish the new Energy Efficiency Directive, which will oblige Member States, on the one hand, to set mandatory national energy efficiency targets, and on the other hand to establish regulations affecting multiple eco- nomic sectors and actors. The reason behind the regulatory initiative of the Commission is that of the 20-20-20 targets of the EU, the 20% primary energy savings goal, as forecasted in 2007, is unlikely to be met based on the present trajec- tory of energy use (that is, considering already adopted measures), and actual savings are likely to be less than 10% by 2020. The new Directive, therefore, should in principle generate primary energy savings of about 200 Mtoe. The national targets of primary or final energy consumption, expressed in absolute values, to be submitted by the Member States by 30 April 2013, will be summed by the European Commission, and if the total does not meet the 2020 energy use target of the Community (1474 Mtoe), then the Commission may adjust the proposed national figures. Besides the requirements of the EU, in our article we also describe the instruments that can be used for compliance.

One of the objectives of the European Union is the development of an Integrated European electricity market by the end of 2014. As part of this endeavour, a lot of the member states participate in market coupling initiatives Hungary made its contribution to market integration when on 11 September 2012, as the first trading day, the coupling of the Czech, Slovakian and Hungarian day-ahead electricity markets started. The article evaluates the performance of the market in the first two months.

The regulation that is called market coupling in European jargon is a logical expansion of the EU regulatory reform that has been going on for over a decade now, an essential concept of which has been the so called “unbundling” policy. Unbun- dling has prescribed the complete separation of network operation and energy production and trade, expecting the intensification of market competition for potentially competing activities. Within the market model based on the unbundling concept network access can be purchased from the transmission system operators in the form of physical transmission capacity utilisation rights.