Single Day-Ahead Coupling

The Single Day-ahead Coupling (SDAC) aims to create a unified pan-European day-ahead electricity market that promotes trading efficiency, competition, and resource utilization. It efficiently allocates cross-border transmission capacities 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. Simply put, buyers and sellers of energy (market participants) can 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 maintain balance (i.e. supplying the correct amount of energy) after the closing of the day-ahead market.

The ability 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 to ensure system security.

On June 13, 2024, the 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 goal of the project 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 bidding zones of the EU member states: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

These countries are at the heart of Europe, which is why the Core CCR programme is important for further European market integration.

The project has been successfully launched on June 8, 2022.

Italian Borders Working Table

The 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 a European target model for the Capacity Allocation and Congestion Management. The project aims to define the pre-coupling, post-coupling and exceptional situations processes necessary for the functioning of Market Coupling between the Italian Borders partners day-ahead markets.

The Pre- and Post-Coupling Design project was implemented in 2013, and a high-level architecture of Pre-coupling and Post-coupling processes was defined. The operational phase of market coupling on Italy's northern borders under the auspices of MRC started in early 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.