Impact of an Enlargement of the Flow Based Region in Continental Europe

In the CWE region, flow based market coupling went live in May, 2015. However, a foreseen broader flow based region triggers additional questions from various perspectives. On the one hand, market participants wonder how flow based mechanisms affect the market clearing. On the other hand, TSOs deal with the issues of redispatch and the future development of the respective volumes. Policy makers, as another stakeholder, ask about the potential increase of the overall market efficiency. To contribute to these questions, we propose a tool chain in this paper, which consists of three main steps: Capacity Calculation Methodology, hybrid flow based market coupling and a redispatch simulation. In exemplary investigations, we apply the developed tool chain on two use cases with a different scope of the flow based region. The main results indicate, more overall converging prices in Europe and a significant increase of trade restricting network elements, also located within bidding zones, in case of a broader flow based region. Additionally, the overall fundamental system efficiency increases by 150 million Euros per year in our exemplary investigation.