Single Intraday Coupling: Making borders flexible
Cross-border liquidity, especially for contracts with finer granularity, is crucial for electricity markets with growing shares of renewables. This is why in 2020, EPEX SPOT, in cooperation with the TSOs concerned, launched 15 and 30-minute contracts at five borders in Central Western Europe.
The majority of Europe’s Intraday electricity markets are coupled within the Single Intraday Coupling, or SIDC. It is a platform which matches contracts continuously across markets, as long as there is enough capacity on interconnectors – a scheme called implicit trading. In so doing, liquidity and trading opportunities are increased in all coupled markets.
Since its start, the focus of SIDC was on 60-minute contracts, which is the long-time standard of organised power markets. However, Intraday markets have been a place for innovation. In the past 10 years, EPEX SPOT has developed 15 and 30-minute contracts on national Intraday markets and thus greatly facilitated the integration of renewable energy sources. Now, given the success and importance of these contracts, this innovation is brought to an European level.
Pooling of cross-country capacity across Central Western Europe
After the roll-out of SIDC across many European regions in 2018 and 2019, 2020 was indeed a year of improvements and refinements. On 10 December 2020, cross-border trading for 15 and 30-minute contracts went live at several borders. Since this day, implicit trading of contracts with finer granularity are available across CWE:
- 30-minute products on the French-Belgian border;
- 15-minute products on the Austrian-Hungarian border;
- 15 and 30-minute products on the Belgian-German, Belgian-Dutch and Dutch-German borders.
Offering these new cross-border products with finer granularity was a joint challenge of several stakeholders of the power trading sector. In addition to adaptations of the SIDC platform itself, assured by the Nominated Electricity Market Operators like EPEX SPOT, transmission system operators needed to adapt their systems in order to be able to receive nominations on a 15 or 30-minute basis.
A contribution to the European energy transition
When it comes to market integration of renewables, flexibility is key. Cross-border 15 and 30-minute contracts provide additional trading opportunities for members closer to real-time. They can balance their portfolio at finer granularity – an indispensable tool for the efficient integration of renewables.
The introduction of 15 and 30-minutes cross-border contracts now enables Belgian and Dutch market parties to access existing liquidity of 15-minutes products in Germany and Austria, and 30-minutes products in Germany and France, where these cross-border products are already in place. Wind from the North Sea can now easily be traded with German, Austrian or even Hungarian market participants – automatically matched through the SIDC solution. In this regard, the new cross-border contracts contribute to the European energy transition and the EU Green Deal.
The SIDC project itself awaits new extensions: 2021 and 2022 will be exciting times for European Intraday trading.
orders were placed on EPEX SPOT’s Intraday trading system M7 on average in 2020 – per day.
That's the increase on year, all while staying the most reliable platform in Europe.
The SIDC project ran a successful year, starting the year with the Nordic geographical expansion and finishing it with the introduction of 15 and 30-minute products for multiple market areas and interconnectors. In so doing, we were constantly increasing trading possibilities for our members – all this despite the pandemic preventing physical meetings taking place, used to play an important role in the cooperation.
The project worked hard to maintain the quality of operations and optimise it, resulting in the continuous availability and growing liquidity.
