22.10.2020

SIDC: New 15 and 30 minutes cross-border intraday products on bidding zone borders between Belgium, Germany, France and The Netherlands

On Thursday 10 December 2020, the Nominated Electricity Market Operators (NEMOs) EPEX SPOT and Nord Pool EMCO and Transmission System Operators (TSOs) Amprion, Elia, RTE and TenneT will launch:

30 minutes cross- border products in intraday continuous trading on the Belgian-French border; and
15 and 30 minutes cross- border products in intraday continuous trading on the Belgian-German, Belgian-Dutch and Dutch-German borders.

By the introduction of these products, the TSOs will fulfil the obligation to offer on their borders cross-zonal capacities for the Single Intraday Coupling (SIDC) with least common multiple of the imbalance settlement periods (ISP) at respective sides of the bidding zone border.

Advantages for market parties

The introduction of these products will allow market participants to sell or buy cross-border products with the same resolution as the ISPs of the Belgian, Dutch, French and German-Luxembourgian bidding zones. This should enhance the possibilities for imbalance management by market parties, closer to real-time.

Also, the introduction of 15 minutes products on the BE-DE, BE-NL and DE-NL borders and 30 minutes on the BE-FR border enables Belgian and Dutch market parties to access existing market 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.

Implementation details

These new cross-border products in Belgium and The Netherlands will be available for cross-border trades via the XBID platform, as of Thursday 10 December 2020.

These products will be supplemental to the 60 minutes cross-border products currently in place. Bids for 15 and 30 minutes products will be added to the shared order books of the NEMOs, which will contain 15, 30 and 60 minutes products.

Bids made for 15, 30 and 60 minutes products will be matched with other cross-border products with the same time resolution. Thus a bid for a 15 minutes product will be matched with another bid for a 15 minutes product. The possible implementation of a cross-product matching functionality in the SIDC platform, by virtue of which multiple 15 minutes products could be matched against a 30 or 60 minutes product, is under further investigation by the TSOs and NEMOs.

As a first step, 24 nominations gates will stay in place on all the borders except for the Dutch-German border, which will already have 96 gates in December 2020. The Belgian-French border will move to 48 gates and the Belgian-Dutch/Belgian-German borders to 96 gates, in 2021.