The North-Western Europe (NWE) day-ahead price coupling project has just started. This pilot project implements day-ahead market coupling between the following countries: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany/Austria, Great Britain, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland (via the SwePol Link), and Sweden.

EURELECTRIC Secretary General Hans ten Berge said:

‘As a strong proponent of European market integration, EURELECTRIC welcomes today’s scheduled go-live of the NWE day-ahead price coupling as an important step towards building integrated spot markets. We look forward to the prospect of Iberia joining by the middle of this year. However, we should not stop there. Other regions like Central East or South East should rapidly make clear when they will be ready to join, to fulfil the political aspiration of completing the Internal Energy Market by the end of this year.‘

‘Looking beyond day-ahead markets, the growing penetration of intermittent generation will also bring more emphasis on closer to real time markets. This requires robust cross-border intraday and balancing markets. We continue to be concerned about the significant delay in building a European intraday platform and urge power exchanges and TSOs to transfer the fruitful experience gained in the spot market to the intra-day project. We also believe that a more ambitious and more European approach on balancing would be necessary than what is currently foreseen in the draft network code on balancing.’