As you will be aware, during today’s (Tuesday 4 February) market coupling process Nord Pool experienced a technical issue which resulted in a partial decoupling of Nord Pool central/western Europe (CWE) markets.
As set out in the market coupling procedures, all order books were reopened at 12.50 CET for 10 minutes, the auction was then run and the remaining market areas (Nordic, Baltic and UK) remained coupled.
Due to the partial decoupling in CWE, at 14:15 CET Nord Pool reopened the order books for 10 minutes to run local auctions. The same technical issue was encountered again and we were not able to calculate market results within the deadlines set out in the market coupling procedures (deadline for distributing market results from the CWE local auction is 14.45 CET). Consequently, Nord Pool was left with no choice other than to cancel the local auction.
Our initial investigation shows that the technical issue was triggered by order submission to the auction which affected our system’s ability to successfully aggregate the purchase and sales curves. This situation, which has never been encountered before, prevented us from submitting the aggregated order book to the common calculation.
Our team has been working to develop and test a reliable fix to the problem, which has been deployed this evening.
We are now undertaking a more detailed analysis of what occurred today and, when completed, will share our conclusions with customers to help avoid any repetition of the issue.
In the meantime we would like to apologise once again for the inconvenience that today’s partial decoupling created for our CWE customers.
About Nord Pool
Nord Pool, Europe’s leading power market, delivers efficient, simple and secure trading across Europe. The company offers day-ahead and intraday trading, clearing and settlement to customers regardless of size or location. Today 360 companies from 20 countries trade on Nord Pool’s markets.
Nord Pool operates markets in the Nordic and Baltic regions, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and the UK. Nord Pool is a Nominated Electricity Market Operator (NEMO) in 15 European countries, while also servicing power markets in Croatia and Bulgaria. In 2019 Nord Pool had a total turnover of 494 TWh traded power. The company has offices in Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn, London and Berlin.
Nord Pool has 25 years of power market experience built on offering flexibility, transparency, innovation, greater choice and participation to our customers.
Oslo, 4 February 2020
For further information, please contact:
Stina Johansen, +47 916 50 603 - stina.johansen@nordpoolgroup.com