Romanian power traders slam plan that could reveal positions to market

The Romanian energy regulator is proposing that the country’s state-owned exchange OPCOM publishes the identity of each company alongside the amount of electricity that each has bought and sold on a day-ahead basis in order to make trading “more transparent”, ICIS has learnt.

ANRE’s proposal, seen by ICIS, foresees the publication of the amount of electricity each market participant has bought or sold in each hour. The information would be available on OPCOM’s website the day after delivery.

But traders reacted angrily on Friday to the unprecedented proposals, labelling them “pointless”, “extreme” and “unnecessary”, while potentially compromising the trading positions of individual companies to the entire market.

Although not compromising live day-ahead positions, the theoretical risk is that repeatedly trading one side of the market, for example, buying lots of volume for consecutive days, would reveal a short position for the week or month in delivery.

OPCOM already publishes the total traded volume and price for each hour of the day-ahead product – this is generally standard for all exchanges across Europe.

But ANRE wants to go much further. The regulator considers the identity step necessary, the proposal documents said, because it has concerns over an absence of specific rules regarding the publication of transactions under the day-ahead market regulations. This, the documents continued, deviates from provisions of the country’s energy law.

“ANRE realised the importance of implementing transparency provisions similar to all wholesale electricity markets,” the document claimed.

But Traders slammed the proposal, saying it would take transparency to an extreme and impracticable level.

“If they want a transparent market they should just copy Germany,” one trader advised.

A compromise was also suggested by one market source, whereby individual bids and offers would be published publicly but not the identities of the companies. This is a model already practiced in the more transparent markets, such as the Nordic futures curve ran by Nasdaq.

“What’s the purpose?” one Romanian trader asked and, putting the boot in, he added: “Why don’t we publish the shoe size of all participants as well?”

ANRE was not available for comment at the time of writing.

The OPCOM exchange officially joined the market coupling initiative of the Hungarian, Slovak and Czech exchanges on Wednesday ( see EDEM 18 November 2014 ). Irina Peltegova