CWE Flow-Based Market Coupling launch to be pushed over the winter (31 March 2015)

New target go-live on 31 March 2015

25 September 2014 – The partners of the Flow-Based project in Central Western Europe (CWE – Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) have decided to target a new launch date on 31 March 2015, due to an exceptional situation on the Belgian market this winter.

The Belgian transmission system operator, Elia, has informed the project partners about a specific situation for Belgium this winter with a risk of load shedding. This risk may be reinforced in case of extreme meteorological conditions. The Belgian market will need to cope with an unprecedented situation leading to potential price spikes and curtailment.

In the context of this exceptional outlook, the go-live of the Flow-Based capacity calculation and allocation methodology in CWE, originally foreseen for November 2014, has been reconsidered. Any additional factor increasing the uncertainty in Belgium needs to be avoided. Therefore, CWE Flow-Based project partners have decided to avoid a launch before or during the winter 2014 / 2015 and to reschedule the target go-live date of Flow-Based Market Coupling to 31 March 2015.

Until then, the daily parallel run of the CWE Flow-Based project will be maintained. The winter period will demonstrate how the market will behave in this specific scarcity situation. Project partners and market participants will also gain further experience with the behavior of Flow-Based in such circumstances, which did not occur in the daily parallel run until now.

The parallel run will be continued over the winter, and the project parties will strive to complete all technical and regulatory requirements as planned, and to confirm the technical readiness by the end of November 2014 in order to secure the target Flow-Based go-live on 31 March 2015.