Hungary joins Pan-European day-ahead power market

The electricity markets of the 4M MC region of the central and eastern European countries (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania) and the MRC region of the western European countries were linked up successfully on Thursday, transmission system operator MAVIR said.

Countries were linked up as part of the Interim Coupling Project, which aims to further develop regional integration of day-ahead organized electricity markets by introducing Net Transmission Capacity (NTC) based implicit capacity allocation.

Single Day-ahead Coupling (SDAC) allocates scarce cross-border transmission capacity in the most efficient way by coupling wholesale electricity markets from different regions through a common algorithm, simultaneously taking into account cross-border transmission constraints and calculating prices.

HUPX, the operator of the organized Hungarian spot power market, said separately that

the next phase of integration is the Bulgarian-Romanian coupling,

which is scheduled three months after the successful go-live of the Interim Coupling. The Croatian-Hungarian coupling will happen simultaneously with the introduction of flow-based capacity calculation in the Core region, including Hungary, scheduled to go-live in February 2022.