Future Power Market Platform

In the last FPM on the blueprint for a European market design intraday auctions with capability bids were identified as a promising next step to further integrate European power markets.

Intraday auctions are foreseen by the CACM regulation at regional level as a complementary measure to the continuous trading. Intraday auctions can increase depth and liquidity of intraday markets and provide a robust price signal as reference price for financial contracts. They also offer the opportunity for the use of capability bids that allow market participants to easily offer the full flexibility of their units or demand according to physical constraints of their facilities and evolving to the complex (and national in scope) products currently implemented in the day ahead market algorithm Euphemia, even without a full 24 hour trading desk. This market based allocation would make more efficient use of transmission capacity than first-come-first-serve approach envisaged for continuous cross-border intraday trading allowing pricing of cross zonal capacity.

However, assuming that there is any will at European level to reconsider the benefits and future role of intraday auctions in practice, many open questions remain regarding the principle design of such auctions, their compatibility with existing national designs, such as continuous trading and how to efficiently coordinate them with ancillary services in general, as reserve margins procurement or congestion management and re-dispatch measures within countries and across borders.