On its website the European Organisation of TSO’s ENTSO-E indicates that it supports the findings of Eurelectric on Balancing Markets in the future. Eurelectric says that the strongest incentive for maintaining system balance is a two0-price system, a different price for long and short positions.

In the Netherlands there is a spread between long and short imbalance prices, during a limited number of periods per annum (6 to 15%). In countries as Belgium and Francenthe respective occurence-percentages are 99,9 and 94,6%.

Eurelectric says that the positioning of only one price for imbalance may lead to ‘gaming’ by market parties and that this may lead to economic optimization at the cost of the TSOs. ENTSO-E agrees and wants to push this further than the Dutch status quo.

“… considering that balancing is aimed at dealing with inevitable imbalances and generation/consumption outages, and is not a place where market participants can procurepredictable energy needs, ETSO considers that imbalance pricing methodology should deliver incentives to be equilibrated and should not deliver any incentive to procure energy at a price lower than the energy market prices (D-1 and/or intraday ones).”

Although it is for now unclear, when and in what shape or form this position will be put into practice by future rules and regulations, it is clear that parties that have joined their portfolios, like PVNED's participants (customers) in the Nrtherlands, will still enjoy the benefits of being part of a larger and more diverse portfolio.

When a regime as described enters into force, this will lead to an increase of imbalance risks, especially for smaller parties in the energy markets. Al the more reason for these parties to investigate a partnership with PVNED, the largest independent PV-/ARP Party in the Benelux. PVNED aggregates PV-portfolios in the Netherlands and ARP-portfolios in Belgium

Link to ENTSO-E reaction          Link to EURELECTRIC report