Flow-based power market coupling (FB MC) in Central Western Europe will not launch this November as planned, with the go-live target date postponed to March 31, the nine project partners said Wednesday.
Exceptional stress on the Belgian power system this winter due to three unplanned nuclear outages was the cause of the delay, the partners said in a statement.
"[Belgian grid operator] Elia has informed the project about the specific situation for Belgium this winter given the unexpected unavailability of a third of centralized generation capacity and the risk of load shedding."
Therefore, CWE project parties have decided to jump over the winter of 2014/15 and target a March 31 launch date "as the implementation of a fundamentally new capacity allocation methodology generally contains a risk, even if thoroughly prepared and tested", the statement said.
"As the Belgian market will already face a stressed operational situation related, for the first time, to generation adequacy, any additional factor increasing the uncertainty needs to be avoided," it said, adding the Belgian market will need to cope with an unprecedented situation leading to potential price spikes and even curtailment.
Flow-based market coupling has been tested by the region's spot power exchanges and transmission system operators in parallel run to the currently used Allocated Transmission Capacity (ATC) model since January 2013.
This new method allows grid operators to further optimize cross-border capacity while preserving grid security, the project partners said previously.
The CWE region comprises Benelux, France and Germany/Austria, covers more than a third of Europe's electricity consumption.
It has already been marked-coupled since November 2010.
In February, the market-coupling initiative was extended to the Northwest Europe region, including the UK and Nordic countries, while Southwest Europe (Spain, Portugal) joined the Price Coupling of Regions (PCR) in May this year.
In October last year, the launch of NWE market-coupling was delayed for different reasons from November 2013 to February 2014.
