China's Electricity Regulatory Legal System

The power industry is the basic industry of people's livelihood. It is considered a natural monopoly industry for the huge amount of investment and the distinct characteristic of economies of scale. Before reforms on the electric power industry, the market structure of the power industry in most countries is a vertical integration model including generation, transmission, distribution and sales. The monopoly scale of this market structure is too huge, the operating efficiency is poor, the supervision on the power industry by the government doesn't work, which causes the low efficiency. Since the 1980s, the whole world except Africa and a few countries in Asia have conducted a market-oriented reform on the power industry. The core of the reform breaking the monopoly and introducing competition, with a focus on reforming the regulatory system and methods of the government and establishing a new government regulatory system according to the market. Those foreign countries who have succeeded in market-oriented reform on the power industry have established and continue to improve the electricity regulatory system, they have mature experience in the aspects of price and incentive regulation, supervision on market power and monopoly, market access supervision, supervision procedure, etc. The market-oriented reform on the power industry of China has just begun, and the relevant legal system is not sound and perfect. In this paper, the legal system of China's power industry supervision is studied. The full text is divided into five chapters.The first chapter, from the relevant concepts of the power industry supervision leads to the power industry supervision system, introduced the history of the system and related legal issues. The second chapter elaborates the theoretical foundation of the supervision system, explore in what degree the government should balance between enforcing supervision and extending marketing reformation in the power industry, demonstrates the necessity of strengthening the power industry supervision in China, also tries to discuss the risks that the supervision may face. The third chapter respectively introduces the reform legislation system for the electric power industry in the United Kingdom, the United States and France, and divides them as high, moderate and low regulated on the power industry, and summarizes the elements needed by the mature supervision system, as well as how to improve the supervision on the power industry of our country. The fourth chapter elaborates the history of the market-oriented reform and our existing regulatory system on the power industry, and analyses it's problem. The fifth chapter discuss how to perfect China's power supervision, form China's legislation system for the electric power industry, propose suggestions and concrete solutions in order to perfect the supervision legislation principle.