Dutch regulator concerned over Belgium winter measures

The emergency measures set out by transmission system operators in central west Europe in the case of an electricity shortage in Belgium leave “room for improvement”, according to the Dutch regulator the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM).

Earlier this month, the grid operators in the region devised a set of measures that would be implemented this winter, if power supply in Belgium becomes tight due to cold weather and little wind (see EDEM 5 December 2014).

These measures involve limiting cross-border capacity on the Dutch-German, Dutch-Belgian and French-German borders, to allow flows from France to Belgium to increase.

Approval

On Monday, the CWE regulators of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands backed these emergency measures.

However, the French regulator said they raised a transparency question since participants would not be able to predict the use of the measure (see EDEM 15 December 2014).

ACM has also voiced concern that the proposal does not include re-dispatch as a measure that would be considered before the last resort of interconnector capacity curtailments, an ACM spokesman said on Tuesday.

Re-dispatch is a countermeasure where the TSOs change the generation and/or load pattern to redistribute the physical flows in the grid.

Re-dispatch

The spokesman pointed to EU regulations on congestion management which state that before cross-borders capacity is curtailed, the TSO should make sure that re-dispatching is not a viable solution.

”The regulators involved believe that it is better to let the market run its natural course as much as possible,” Henk Don, an ACM board member said in a statement on Monday.

“If the market cannot solve the situation, generation in the Netherlands will be reduced, and generation in France will be increased,” the statement added.

The Belgian TSO was not available for immediate comment at the time of writing. Abigail Beall