AkademiaAvtalen post-doctoral scholarship awarded to BECCLE’s Ignacio Herrera Anchustegui

BECCLE’s Ignacio Herrera Anchustegui has been granted 2,5 million kroner to carry out a personal post-doctoral project regarding Competition and Public Procurement Law regulation of energy markets

The Steering Committee of the AkademiaAvtalen, has awarded BECCLE’s Ignacio Herrera Anchustegui 2,5 MNOK for the financing of his 4 year post-doctoral project “Regulating energy markets, a perspective from EEA/EU Competition and Public Procurement Law“.

The AkademiaAvtalen is a research funding agreement between Statoil and the University of Bergen for the funding of innovative and cross-disciplinary research in the field of energy. This is the first time that a researcher from the Faculty of Law of the UiB is granted funds to carry out legal research as part of the AkademiaAvtalen project since its adoption back in 2009. Such generous funding will generate new knowledge and will contribute towards strengthening the teaching and researching capacities of the Faculty in the fields of Competition, Public Procurement, and Energy Law.

The research project:
Ignacio’s project will deal with questions related to the applicability of EU/EEA sectoral competition law to the supply of gas and electricity pursuant to the nationalization process and the implementation of the Electricity and Gas Directives (Directive 2009/72 and Directive 2009/73, respectively). Additionally, the project will explore the regulatory limitations imposed by the Directive on Public Procurement Utilities (Directive 2014/25) to the purchasing of goods, works and services in the areas of generation and distribution of energy, and how these limitations can be waived if there is sufficient exposure to competition.

From a methodological standpoint the research project will adopt a multidisciplinary approach within law and combining law & economics by collaborating with other BECCLE members.

“I am very honored and grateful to have received such generous funding from Statoil that will allow me to carry out legal research in a very important economic sector that remains quite unexplored and with the aim of producing research that is socially relevant and of practical implications. I am very much looking forward to starting this project in 2017”, says Ignacio.