Balancing Services

🇩🇪 We are rolling out improved support for Germany. This involves a view of the whole country, in addition to the existing views per German TSO. We can also now offer data for Germany closer to real-time, both on the map and via the API. You can try out the new features at balancing.services Thanks a lot to Julien Jomaux and Vincent Thevenin for their ideas and feedback, much appreciated! We hope you find it useful.

🇫🇮 The yearly auction results for FCR capacity in Finland are out. No FCR-N capacity was procured on the yearly auction (will be bought on the hourly one). Prices are €3.50/MW/h for FCR-D up (€4/MW/h last year) and €6/MW/h for FCR-D down (€6/MW/h). Volumes are down, with more to be procured from the hourly market.

🇪🇸 Elevated prices on the downwards aFRR capacity market today, with multiple quarter-hours of prices above €200/MW/h. Looking back to October, the prices ended up being lower than in September, mainly due to lower amount of periods where the price was above €100/MW/h. Interesting to see how it plays out in November.

🇩🇪 🇵🇱 An early morning plunge of imbalance prices in Germany, driven by aFRR activation in downward direction. It also impacted Poland to a lesser extent, with a similar incident yesterday morning overshadowing it there.

🇩🇪 An eventful week continues with high volatility in imbalance price in Germany this morning, driven by high volume of activated aFRR in both directions. The range of the volatility is remarkable, we went from €3800/MWh to -€1200/MWh from one quarter-hour to the next.

🇪🇺 🇩🇪 At midnight today (CEST), a bunch of aFRR energy bids for prices with up to €15,000/MWh showed up in Germany. At the same time, similar amount of capacity that was previously offered for -€15,000/MWh is missing. Someone made a sign error? This could explain the price movements we are seeing. Well spotted by Julien Jomaux

🇪🇺 Unusual data coming in from the aFRR market early this morning. The PICASSO CBMPs were extremely volatile. Looking at the raw 4-second data from PICASSO, one can find occasions where the prices jumped from €15,000/MWh to €12/MWh in a span of 4 seconds, across most of Central Europe. However, the activated volumes do not look out of ordinary. This extreme volatility is also largely not reflected in the estimated imbalance prices, as one would expect. Hopefully the day will bring clarity on what happened.

🇵🇱 A lengthy aFRR price spike in Poland this afternoon, with prices staying around €15,000/MWh from 13:05 to 13:20 CEST. Elevated prices also in Czechia and, briefly, in Slovakia. They did not travel up to the Baltics nor to Germany.

🇨🇿 🦙 The impact of ALPACA on the aFRR capacity volumes in Czechia is fascinating, with the ALPACA exchange limits looking like a key piece of information for the market participants. This morning, the average aFRR capacity prices in Germany reached close to €100/MW/h in the upward direction. But as ALPACA did not find a way to import capacity from Czechia, only 105 MW ended up procured there for local demand, with the average price around €2/MW/h. This changed in the afternoon block, starting from 16:00 CEST, where ALPACA allocated 89 MW from Czechia to Germany. With 194 MW procured, the average price jumped to €40/MW/h, and marginal price hit €75/MW/h. The capacity auctions being pay-as-bid make the impact even more pronounced.

🇫🇮 A long period of elevated mFRR energy prices in up direction in Finland this morning. No cross-border mFRR flow from either SE1 or SE3 during that time to Finland. Combined with relatively low volume of mFRR bids available meant that not much volume was left unused at the peak. Note that Fingrid does also have reserve plants with significant capacity available that could be involved in case not enough balancing energy can be bought on the market. It seems that they were not needed today.