On Friday 10 January, the EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) published a new tool for simulating price correlations for forward electricity trading with the potential prices of virtual hubs.
The simulator aims to provide statistical information to support the recommendations of ACER’s 2023 policy paper, which highlighted the need to further develop the EU electricity forward market.
The tool shows the correlations between prices in any EU electricity auction zone and various configurations of a virtual hub price.
A virtual hub price is currently used in the Nordic market region and could be introduced for continental Europe as part of the European Commission’s 2026 review of the Forward Capacity Allocation (FCA) regulation.
ACER believes that the revised regulation should establish a methodology for defining virtual hub prices. The Agency believes that a well-designed virtual hub price would have “stronger correlations with most auction zone prices than the futures products currently used as ‘proxy hedging’”.
To see the ACER publication: https://aeur.eu/f/ezx (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)