Soft Law, Hard Deregulation: Energy Poverty Reporting and the Commission's Push for Market Standardization

The European Union is widely recognized as the primary engine of liberalization in network sectors, yet harmonization efforts are perpetually constrained by Public Service Obligations (PSOs), which legitimize state interventions and set contentious limits on liberalization. Recent scholarship argues that increased reporting requirements balance liberalization with social protection, consolidating a "liberal welfare" model through EU social regulation. On the contrary, I argue that the Commission strategically deploys harmonized data standards, most notably on energy poverty, not to strengthen social regulation but to enable legal challenges to national policy instruments on proportionality grounds, systematically weakening social protections. Through process-tracing of legislative developments, regulatory reports, and court proceedings between 2007 and 2025, the analysis demonstrates how IEA and OECD best practices are transposed into EU soft law, gradually solidifying into benchmarks against which member state deviations appear increasingly disproportionate. As the most likely case, retail price controls exemplify this dynamic: technocratic reporting requirements serve as scaffolding for future marketization in a field that is only ambiguously protected by PSOs. By standardizing definitions and metrics, the Commission creates the informational and legal basis for delegitimizing national protections through mandatory re-evaluations in Energy Market Packages. This analysis reveals that reporting harmonization operates not as social regulation but as a mechanism of market deepening: standardization requirements precede formal legal challenges, enabling the Commission to question necessity and proportionality without explicit deregulation mandates. Rather than strengthening social regulation, these informational requirements systematically narrow policy space for national social protections, demonstrating how the EU advances liberalization through administrative governance against persistent state resistance.