Need to know: key diary dates for European energy markets

The Madrid Forum, where network codes and capacity allocation will be on the agenda, is the main event during the week ahead for the European energy markets.

Elsewhere, France continues its mass coal-plant closure programme for April, important parliamentary debates loom in Germany while a key consultation for gas traders closes at the end of the week in the UK.

The week ahead

A number of monthly electricity capacity auctions occur during the week. Monthly auctions include France-Italy, Belgium-France Belgium-Netherlands, France-Germany, France-Switzerland and France-Spain. See more here .

The 1GW Unit 2 at Czech nuclear power plant Temelin will be offline for planned maintenance from Saturday until 16 June. Also, the 500MW Unit 2 at NPP Dukovany is in maintenance which was extended at short notice this week. It was supposed to end on 15 April but instead will end on Saturday 25 April meaning there’s going to be 1.5GW missing from the Czech system all through the week ahead. Read more here .

On Monday and Tuesday the next Madrid Forum will take place, where European regulatory authorities, national governments and the European Commission will discuss issues around the creation of an internal gas market. Major stakeholders from European gas companies will also be present. Network codes on tariffs and capacity allocation will be on the agenda, as will more general themes on market harmonisation.

On Wednesday SPIMEX will publish monthly data, providing information on gas volumes traded on this Russian exchange platform.

The economics committee of the upper house of the German parliament, Bundesrat, will discuss several energy and climate issues at its Thursday meeting, including a draft law for speeding up transmission grid expansion and support to combined heat and power plants

In Finland, the Energy Authority (EA) previously decided to procure 400MW of strategic electricity reserve capacity to last until the end of June 2017. After the decision was taken in February, the EA invited capacity owners to offer into a tenders for the reserve.

The EA is expected to announce the results by Thursday.

In France, a month of mass coal-fired power plant closures continues. The country is on track to end April with 1.5GW less coal-fired power production than it had at the end of March as environmental regulations cut a swathe through the nation’s fleet. The last of six coal-fired blocks to close its doors this month, the 250MW unit 4 at Vitry-sur-Seine, is due to shut on Friday.

Also on Friday a consultation run by Austrian energy regulator E-Control will come to an end. E-Control has proposed to not implement a gas capacity management system at Austrian border points. This is despite many of these being oversubscribed and many shippers wanting an alternative developed.

Finally, again on Friday, a consultation published by British regulator Ofgem, on whether or not to grant SSE a third party access exemption at the Hornsea storage facility in East Yorkshire, will close.

Further ahead

On 9 April Italian regulator AEEGSI opened a consultation on proposed changes to how the value of electricity network imbalances is calculated. This would impact the methodology to calculate bonuses and penalties to be paid to and by producers when imbalances occur. The consultation ends on 10 May. Read more here .

On 14 May there could be a decision on Italian electricity producer Edipower’s Brindisi Nord plant, which might be transformed into a waste-to-energy plant. A subsidiary of Italian utility group A2A, is planning to convert one 160MW fuel-oil unit at the 1.3GW San Filippo del Mela power plant into a 100MW waste-to-energy facility.

Belgian generator Electrabel aims to finalise its safety case report for the restart of the 1GW nuclear reactors Doel 3 and Tihange 2 in May. An expert panel will meet over the course of the week ahead, a spokeswoman for nuclear watchdog FANC said. Electrabel aims to restart the reactors on 1 July, but has emphasised that final authorisation rests with FANC.

Consultations in the Irish power market on forwards and liquidity and the aggregator of last resort in the new Irish power market closed at the end of March, so the regulator is expected to publish the responses to these in the next few week. Stacy Irish