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Utilities
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HomeThe future electricity intraday market design
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The Commission Regulation (EU) 2015/1222 of 24 July 2015 “establishing a guideline on capacity allocation and congestion management”, hereafter called CACM, defines the target model for a single European market for electricity. However, its current requirements for the single intraday coupling - namely congestion pricing based on actual bids, efficient use of cross-border transmission capacity and continuous trade - are difficult to reconcile. The main reason is that continuous trade implies a first-come first-served allocation of transmission capacity, precluding by definition any congestion-based pricing. As a consequence, in the current XBID continuous trading mechanism, transmission capacity is not priced: any remaining or newly released capacity after the day-ahead market clearing is allocated for free, on a first-come first-served basis. This can create dispatch distortions in the short term, and investment distortions in the long term. In that context, this study aims at analysing possible options for improvements in the intraday market design, with a view to establishing a scheme for an efficient and effective transmission capacity pricing method. As a general finding of this study, it appears that specific requirements of 1) pricing congestion based on actual orders, 2) treatment of nonstandard products and 3) inclusion of flow-based market coupling constraints all tend to favour auctions over continuous trading. Forward looking, we believe that a higher share of renewable energy sources (RES) with their inherent short-term uncertainty, in combination with the introduction of a flow-based grid representation for the intraday time frame and the need to introduce non-standard products with finer time granularity, will render intraday auctions indispensable. This trend may be further reinforced if a bidding zone review would lead to smaller zones. Auctions may also foster participation of new and smaller market participants, which seems essential in a world of growing shares of decentralized renewable generation. Hence the key question is not if auctions need to be introduced, but rather when to introduce them and how many are needed. The auction frequency is driven by the need of market participants to trade in specific moments. Such events obviously relate to changes in the information about the market like recalculations of the transmission capacities in intraday, but also to better information on RES output closer to real-time, as well as to the availability of products with finer time granularity at the intraday gate opening. Current proposals on how to integrate auctions in European intraday markets range from one auction (All TSOs’ initial proposal for pricing cross-zonal capacity) to high-frequency auctions (Deutsche Börse AG Continuous Auction Market model). We believe that one auction is not sufficient, while we question at the same time the performance of high-frequency (e.g. every few seconds) auctions. Our following recommendations are intended to further improve the working of the crosszonal intraday markets: - As a prerequisite and next to an alignment on cross-zonal intraday market opening and gate closure times (as decided by ACER in 2018), also cross-border products should be aligned. In light of increasing RES shares, we plead in particular for the introduction of products with a 15-minutes time granularity. - Cross-zonal intraday auctions should be introduced: - An opening auction, to allow for efficient allocation of transmission capacity left from day-ahead, conditional on the introduction of products with finer time granularity than in day-ahead; - One evening auction, to allocate transmission capacity that would result from the capacity recalculation process which will be established at regional level for the intraday timeframe. If more capacity re-calculations are possible in the future additional auctions have to be added; - 8 to 12 additional auctions starting at midnight, conditional on a flowbased grid representation being introduced in intraday, to adjust transmission capacity usage following better information on RES output. -To allow market participants to react quickly to events and in line with the current CACM, we suggest keeping continuous trading in-between the auctions, possibly with simplified products. Finally, we believe that our discussion on intraday markets has to be seen in a wider context. It touches upon the purpose of the intraday market. Initially, day-ahead markets were considered as “spot” markets, with intraday markets and balancing markets being adjustment markets. This view is already changing: the moment of exchange of power should be the spot market, as argued by (Smeers Y. , 2008), while all other markets have to be seen as forward markets. From that perspective, we already have a closing auction in the form of the balancing market – which essentially remains national until the balancing guideline will be fully implemented. Further integration even closer to real-time will thus be needed.
- Published:
- Corporate author(s): Directorate-General for Energy (European Commission) , SWECO , TRACTEBEL Advisory and Advanced Analytics
- Personal author(s): Schumacher, Linda ; Küpper, Gerd ; Henneaux, Pierre ; Bruce, Johan ; Klasman, Björn ; Ehrenmann, Andreas
- Themes: Electricity
- Subject: cross-border cooperation , electricity supply , energy transport , regulation (EU) , report , single market
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| ISSN | ISBN 978-92-79-88757-4 | DOI 10.2833/004191 | Catalogue number MJ-01-18-717-EN-N |