Turkey’s much-anticipated intra-day market was due to launch at 18:00 hours Istanbul time on Tuesday with as many as 129 participants registered to trade.
The 24-hour platform will be hosted on the existing day-ahead platform, PMUM, and handled by the grid operator, TEIAS, until 1 September.
All day-ahead and intra-day operations currently carried out on PMUM will transfer to the new day-ahead exchange, EPIAS, after that date, a source at the regulator EPDK told ICIS on Tuesday.
The PMUM platform experienced some technical glitches earlier in the day, but the website was up and running again by mid-afternoon on Tuesday.
The source told ICIS previously that as much as 600MWh was likely to be traded on an hourly basis on the intra-day market, or the equivalent of an estimated 8-10% of the volumes currently changing hands on the day-ahead market PMUM.
A market participant welcomed the news, but said traders may find it difficult to optimise their portfolios if there were no real-time data available.
“There is a need to publish real-time information about availabilities and outages in the system,” he said.
A source at the regulator EPDK said market participants were right to complain about the lack of real-time data for now.
“We are trying to compel [electricity] distributors to expand their real-time metering and share these data with other participants,” he said. “If we had more money we would have had more real-time data now.”
The EPDK had been keen to push ahead with the launch, given that the project had already been delayed four times since it was first mooted in 2013.
Some sources active in the market feared the platform would be delayed once more because of staff shortages at TEIAS.
However, the EPDK source said on Tuesday 10 new staff had been hired and would work together with TEIAS colleagues to operate the platform during night hours.
The personnel will then transfer to EPIAS once it begins operation in September.
(Source: © ICIS HEREN - THE ICIS HEREN REPORTS - EDEM 19124 / 30 June 2015; www.heren.com)