Market Coupling Projects
Single Day-ahead Coupling
The Single Day-ahead Coupling (SDAC) aims to create a unified pan-European day-ahead electricity market, promoting trading efficiency, competition, and resource utilization. It allocates cross-border transmission capacity efficiently and enables cross-border trading via implicit auctions for the next day's power delivery.
SDAC relies on the Price Coupling of Regions (PCR) solution and is a collaborative effort between Nominated Electricity Market Operators (NEMOs) and Transmission System Operators (TSOs).
More information about SDAC is available here
Single Intraday Coupling
Single Intraday Coupling (SIDC) creates a single EU cross-zonal intraday electricity market. In simple terms, buyers and sellers of energy (market participants) are able to work together across Europe to trade electricity continuously on the day the energy is needed.
As renewable intermittent production such as solar energy increases, market participants are becoming more interested in trading in the intraday markets. This is because it has become more challenging for market participants to be in balance (i.e. supplying the correct amount of energy) after the closing of the day-ahead market.
Being able to balance their positions until one hour before delivery time is beneficial for market participants and for the power systems alike by, among other things, reducing the need for reserves and associated costs while allowing enough time for carrying out system operation processes for ensuring system security.
On June 13, 2024 IDA project was successfully launched.
More information about SIDC is available here.
Core Flow-Based Market Coupling
The Core Flow-Based Market Coupling (Core FB MC) is a collaborative project involving 16 Transmission System Operators and 10 Nominated Electricity Market Operators (NEMOs). The project's goal is to develop and implement a Flow-Based (FB) day-ahead market coupling system across the entire Core capacity calculation region (Core CCR) within the framework of the single day-ahead coupling (SDAC). The parties involved in the Core CCR seek to establish the necessary operational conditions to optimize the use of the transmission system from a regional perspective in order to facilitate the creation of a single European market.
The Core CCR consists of the bidding zone borders between the following EU Member States’ bidding zones: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
These countries are in the heart of Europe, which is why the Core CCR programme is substantial for further European market integration.
The project has successfully gone live in on 08/06/2022.
Italian Borders Working Table
Italian Borders Working Table (IBWT) is a joint Market Coupling project between the Transmission System Operators and Power Exchanges of Austria, France, Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Switzerland to implement the European target model for the Capacity Allocation and Congestion Management. The project aims to define the pre-coupling, post coupling and exceptional situations processes that are necessary to allow the operation of Market Coupling between the Italian Borders partners day-ahead markets.
The pre- and Post-Coupling Design project was performed in 2013, and a high-level architecture of Pre-coupling and Post-coupling processes was defined. The operational phase of market coupling on Italian northern borders under the MRC umbrella started in the beginning of 2015. The border between Slovenia and Austria was added to the project in 2016 but was later removed since it migrated to the Core region.