Table of contents
Within the next year and a half EU member states need to adjust their support schemes for the generation of renewable based electricity to the prescriptions of the EU guideline on state aid published in 2014. As the main rule, the guideline requires the allocation of support through a bidding process and the direct market sale of the produced electricity. Accordingly, the support schemes based on feed-in tariffs and the obligatory purchase of the produced electricity, currently still applied in a number of member states, need to be amended: either a green certificate system has to be introduced, or renewable based electricity generation can be supported through a bidding process based premium. The deadline for the introduction of the measure of directly selling in the market is 1 January 2016, while the deadline for competitive bidding processes is 1 January 2017.
Romanian OPCOM joined the coupled Czech-Slovakian-Hungarian electricity markets on 20. November 2014, thus forming the 4M market coupling. Our article gives an evaluation of the performance of the first five months of market coupling. The first part of the analysis introduces the theoretical model and the main principles of the market coupling, then we assess the performance of the coupling considering price convergence as an indicator.
Recently, European electricity market models have been facing serious challenges: continuously increasing renewable electricity generation and unfavourable price conditions/negative spread resulted in collapsing profitability of fossil-based, primarily natural gas fired power plants, reducing significant part of existing capacities and postponing or cancelling new investments. The above processes have raised fears in relation to security of supply in several European countries. There are many who would treat the problem by introducing capacity mechanisms rewarding for the availability of power plant capacities.
Therefore, it is important both for European countries who are hesitating about the introduction of capacity mechanisms and the European Commission who is making efforts to establish and maintain single European energy market to learn the structure and rules of the British capacity market and the consequences that can be drawn from the outcomes of the first capacity auction held in December 2014.
