Monthly cross-border capacity for Greece and Turkey will be auctioned on the regional electricity auction platform SEE CAO as early as September, it emerged on Thursday (18th June).
The recently established coordinated auction office for Southeast Europe (SEE CAO) currently only services the borders between Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Montenegro for daily and monthly auctions. Greece, Turkey and Kosovo are also stakeholders in the project.
Aleksandar Mijuskovic, executive director of the SEE CAO said at an energy event in Budapest that the platform will be ready to start monthly cross-border capacity auctions in September this year. Until then, some further testing will be carried out to ensure a good functionality of the platform.
The common auction platform is meant to unify the region and improve ease of trading by holding auctions of seven different grid operators in the same place.
The SEE CAO project has already faced some difficulties, with the first coordinated monthly electricity cross-border auction pushed back two months due to technical issues, from October 2014 to December (see EDEM 23 September 2014).
The border between Greece and Albania could also be launching yearly auctions at the start of 2016. The delay for this has so far stemmed from technical issues. Mijuskovic added that capacity auctions on the border could start with daily and monthly to prevent any issues with the platform at the yearly auctions.
While the Bulgarian TSO is reluctant to join a regional auction platform, some issues with VAT also prevented Macedonian MEPSO to participate in the project.
Mijuskovic noted that the platform was still working with the Serbian grid operator EMS towards a possible collaboration for the annual auctions.
A single European platform where market participants can bid for cross-border capacity is part of upcoming European regulation, as stated in the network code on forward capacity allocation.