On Tuesday, 30 March, the European Commission decided to open a formal investigation in order to determine whether the power exchange EPEX Spot SE (EPEX Spot) has taken advantage of its dominant position to hinder the activities of its competitors on the market for electricity intraday trading facilitation services in at least six Member States (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands).
For Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, responsible for competition policy, “preserving healthy competition between power exchanges and between traders contributes to accurate price and investment signals for new sources of energy”.
Intraday markets are the markets where buyers and sellers of electricity can trade power in the last few hours before it is injected into the network.
The European Commission is concerned that EPEX Spot has restricted competition in the intraday markets.
It is alleged that the power exchange may have adopted behaviours aimed at crowding out its competitors by restricting the ability of their customers to access the entire liquidity of the intraday market. This behaviour, if proven, may constitute an exclusionary practice in breach of EU competition rules (abuse of a dominant position). In particular, this behaviour can distort the prices of trading services and could ultimately lead to higher electricity prices for consumers and slow the greening of the electricity system by preventing the cost-effective integration of renewable technologies into the electricity mix.
EPEX Spot is the largest power exchange in several EU Member States. Electricity trading is a market that is worth tens of billions of euros per year. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)