Czechia joins European intraday market, traded volumes surge

On Tuesday 19 November, the Czech Republic joined the European coupling of intraday electricity markets as part of the so-called second implementation wave. A sharp increase in traded electricity volumes was recorded in the first days of trading. 

The project, known as Single Intraday Coupling (SIDC), has involved 21 European countries since Tuesday. In addition to the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Croatia have also newly joined the project. These countries joined the 14 countries already operating SIDC (Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Lithuania, Latvia, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Austria, Spain and Sweden).

The Czech Republic is represented in the SIDC project by the electricity market operator, OTE, a.s., and the Czech transmission system operator, ČEPS, a.s.

“After seven years of intensive work in preparing the XBID project specifications, followed by countless negotiations in international working groups and the identification of optimal solutions, we have succeeded in fulfilling one of OTE’s strategic goals. For traders and customers in the Czech Republic, this means that electricity knows no borders and can be traded across almost the entire continent within the intraday market. Another significant milestone will be the coupling of day-ahead markets, where we hope for the same success next year, but no later than in 2021,” said Aleš Tomec, Chairman of the Board of Directors of OTE, a.s.

The intraday market provides scope for trading on the day of electricity delivery. Trades are generally concluded several hours in advance, allowing traders to strengthen their trading positions. Trading takes place in the form of so-called continuous trading.

“Trading for the delivery day of 20 November 2019 began on 19 November 2019 at 15:00. Cross-border capacities for that day were submitted by transmission system operators at 21:55. At that point, offers submitted on foreign platforms became visible to market participants on the OTE platform, up to the level of available cross-border capacities. The first cross-border trade took place just 1 minute later. During the first 15 minutes, 70 trades were concluded, of which 60 were cross-border, with a total volume of 331 MWh. In the first 2 hours of cross-border trading, more than 1,000 trades with a total volume of 1,400 MWh were concluded for the delivery day of 20 November 2019. During the night, trades took place between the Czech Republic and countries including Germany, Finland, Spain, Estonia, Croatia and others,” OTE, a.s. describes in its published press release.

The first days following the Czech Republic’s inclusion in the SIDC project already brought a sharp increase in the volume of electricity traded on the intraday market. While roughly 1.4 GWh of electricity was traded on the Czech intraday market on 19 November, the figure was 15.5 GWh on 20 November and 14.9 GWh on 21 November.

For comparison, 317.4 GWh of electricity was traded on the Czech intraday market during the first six months of this year, while 550.2 GWh was traded during the whole of last year.