ABSTRACT
The chapter provides insights on the behaviour of the Commission in the legislative process leading to the Directive. It defines the horizontal preference alignment as heterogeneous because member states had different preferences on how to implement unbundling. The chapter identifies an empirically informed small subset of member states sharing homogeneous preferences and provides support for these hypotheses to be confirmed. It provides background information about the EU internal energy market in gas and the process of its liberalisation. The chapter overviews the gas value chain and then moves to the concept of unbundling looking at its evolution across the three Energy Packages. It starts with identifying the preferences of the Commission and identifies the preferences of the member states which were shaped as a reaction to the Commission proposal and defines the vertical preference alignment as heterogeneous as well.
