Attorney Banasik spoke to energy lawyers about the challenges of transformation

In Warsaw at the POWERPOL energy congress, the board member of the Association of Energy Law Lawyers and managing partner of BWW law firm moderated a panel in which practitioners from major energy companies demonstrated the importance of regulation in the transition.

The starting point for the discussion was the speech made by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the Minister of Finance during a meeting with entrepreneurs at the WSE headquarters on 10 February 2025. They announced then that they would ‘radically accelerate the energy transformation’ while maintaining the competitiveness of the Polish economy and ensuring attractive electricity prices.

– We will try to think together how the ambitious goals of the transformation, i.e. huge outlays on new generation sources and the development of electricity grids to connect RES, can be reconciled, or if they can be reconciled at all, with the task of lowering energy prices, and lowering them in the near future, and not only after the completion of the cycle of these huge investments,’ –  Ms Banasik said at the beginning.

She invited lawyers from the largest companies in the energy sector to join the discussion. Magdalena Pieńkowska, director of the legal department at Polskie Elektrownia Jądrowa (Polish Nuclear Power Plants), spoke about the challenges related to the first nuclear investment in Poland and the nuances that accompany the entire preparation process. She pointed out that in the case of such a project, when it comes to regulations, the speculative law mode plays a major role.

Katarzyna Radzewicz, Director of the Legal Division at the Gas Transmission Operator Gaz-System, spoke about activities that are related to the ‘greening of blue fuel’ and the implementation of the gas and hydrogen package introduced in Europe by a regulation and directive of the European Parliament and the EU Council. This is followed, among other things, by the need to amend the rules that regulate the market and natural gas infrastructure, or to create rules for the creation of a hydrogen market and infrastructure.

PGE announced at the beginning of the year its investment decision in the process of building the first wind farm in the Baltic Sea. The director of the legal division at PGE SA, mec Aleksander Galos, said that we were building competence and knowledge in many offshore-related topics in Poland. Cooperation with foreign law firms, for whom this was also a challenge, was therefore invaluable. In his opinion, legal know-how will certainly be of use in Poland in the next stages of the energy transition.

Jakub Godlewski of Veolia Energy Contracting Poland pointed to the deregulation that the development of renewable energy sources in particular requires in the energy sector. He also raised a very important issue concerning the reduction of energy and heat consumption, i.e. simply the role of energy saving, for example through comprehensive thermo-modernisation.