Analysis of the German Continuous Intraday Market and the Revenue Potential for Flexibility Options

As the share of energy from fluctuating renewable energy resources traded on the German power spot markets has risen over the past years, energy prices on these markets have become more volatile. Therefore, the opportunities for utilizing the flexibility of energy demand or supply to gain monetary benefits have increased significantly. Especially the EPEX Intraday Continuous power market appears to be a favorable market place for demand- and supply-side flexibility options as continuously changing prices for power products offer the possibility to profit from consecutive rescheduling up to only five minutes before delivery. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we provide an analysis of the development of the German Intraday Continuous power market over the years 2015 to 2017, and secondly, we quantify the revenue potential for different flexibility options participating in this market. The results of this work show an increasing revenue potential over the course of the three years. The revenues equal up to 3.4 times the wholesale energy costs for solely consuming and up to 12.4 times for consuming and generating flexibility options.