Assessment of balancing market designs in the context of European coordination

Abstract

This paper studies the current balancing market designs from four exemplary European countries – namely Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Great Britain – in the framework of European market coordination. Cross-country comparison shows that current market designs are widely diverse and are driven by country-specific market environments. However, ongoing adaptions towards European cooperation and the challenges presented by increasing wind and solar power shares drive a tendency towards closer to real-time operation, resulting in market design changes such as finer product time resolution, shorter imbalance settlement periods and reduced gate closure times.