European Electricity Markets: Part II

Jakub Tomczak, Marcin Walendowski and Jarosław Wajer

This chapter presents a review of the European electricity markets starting from a general overview of wholesale markets, discussing the most important issues such as market coupling (MC) and capacity markets, and ending with a description of supply markets. In this chapter all the terms for the electricity value chain are used in line with the definitions stipulated in the previous chapter.

The first section looks at the most important European electricity markets, and presents the key European wholesale markets, which are analysed considering the level of liberalisation, market participants and their structure, volume of electricity traded and shares of volume traded in the over-the-counter (OTC) or power exchange market.

The following section examines the MC mechanism, which consists of combining spot markets operated by different exchanges into one, and presents the tools used by the European Union (EU) to increase the integration of Europe’s energy markets, which is one of the EU’s priorities.

Then, the section called “Power exchanges” provides key information concerning selected European power exchanges and presents a comparison of product range and exchange volume