Bogdan Tudorache
Many players of the energy market have stated that the settlement of transactions on OPCOM in 15 minutes cannot take place from January 1, as the market is not ready. The position of the market players was transmitted to ANRE during a meeting last week, which approved on Wednesday, December 16, 2020, the postponement by one month of the launch of the settlement to 15 minutes. Thus, the new program would enter into force on February 1. Will the market be ready, yet?
“Producers will notify and sell at 15 minutes, but only in the Intraday segment and in the markets with which we are coupled. On DAM we will not be able to buy in 15 minutes. OPCOM does not have platforms and integrations ready so that we can do this trading digitally. We’ll end up selling on Intraday from 24 to 96 intervals, but manually, because we can’t do that as it happens on any other stock exchange. Transelectrica claims that it is ready, but even there the web services do not work, everything must be done on the old method, with xml – which will bring an extra effort in all forecasting, trading departments, because things will be quite complicated. It will be a major change for the market,” said a company official.
“How to have a settlement at 15 minutes when household consumers are not measured even at one month, but at 3-6 months? There are huge imbalances in the market. Here things should have gone hand in hand with the large-scale implementation of smart metering, but also with the adaptation of systems. There has been talk of intraday as a panacea… for imbalances, or, it is not so. If you are a small player, you have to pay a lot every year. The lack of automation overlaps with excessive red tape. If you make an intra-day transaction today, you must notify separately the dispatcher to which you are assigned, modify a model in the Transelectrica system, in which to modify the new notified position, etc. Doing something like this is impossible…We do, manually, excel spread sheets, while the outside markets work with robots – imagine what effort this entails especially for small players who do not have enough dedicated staff… The impact will be and on suppliers, not just producers, because of the differences between notified and actual consumption. There are reservations about how this would be done,” said another industry representative.
ANRE approved Transelectrica’s request to extend the transition to the 15-minute settlement interval until February 1, according to a press release.
”Given the complexity of actions and preparatory processes for the transition to the settlement interval (ID) of 15 minutes, the need to complete all functional tests and the need to obtain a functional and organizational validation from all market participants, the National Regulatory Authority in the field of Energy approved today, December 16, 2020, by ANRE Order no. 230/2020, the request formulated by CNTEE Transelectrica SA to extend until 01.02.2021 the term provided in Order 63/2020. Thus, we will dedicate the month of January of the following year entirely to the necessary tests and corrections, as well as to the dissemination of their results to all the parties involved in the application of the transition to the 15-minute settlement,” Transelectrica officials claim.