General questions

Agreements and contracts

Elspot - products and trading

Elbas - products and trading

Settlement and collateral

Urgent market messages (UMM)

Market Conduct Rules

General questions

If you have any further questions, please contact Nord Pool Spot at webmaster@npspot.com.

The Elspot price is based on bids and offers received from the participants and clearing customers trading in Elspot. In the Elspot auction all bids are aggregated into one sales curve and one purchase curve. The price is found where the curves intersect – giving a balance between total volume bought and sold for each hour. You can really say that it is the market who decides the price of electricity. Learn more about the Elspot price formation at Nord Pool Spot here.

In Europe, several market coupling projects have been initiated and hence open up to new terminologies used in these projects. An explanation of the different terminologies used in the market coupling project can be found here.

Nord Pool Spot has NVE (Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate) as regulatory authority. NVE also issues Nord Pool Spot's market place concession. OED (the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy) allows Nord Pool Spot to organise the physical exchange of power with neighbouring countries.

Nord Pool Spot is owned by the four Nordic TSOs - Statnett SF, Svenska Kraftnätt, Fingrid and Energinet.dk - and Nord Pool ASA with 20% each.

Market surveillance is a joint function for Nord Pool Spot AS and Nord Pool ASA, and monitors the trading activities in the spot and derivatives markets at Nord Pool and conduct investigations of possible breaches on laws and regulations.

Adjusting to our participant’s needs and wishes is vital to Nord Pool Spot. Besides ordinary market activities Nord Pool Spot receives input from the market through the Product Group for the physical markets and the Market Council. The Product Group for the physical markets is an advisory board for all matters related to trade in physical contracts on Nord Pool Spot. The Product Group consists of trading personnel from our participants. The Market Council is Nord Pool's advisory board for all activities on the Nordic power exchange. Members are power traders and industry representatives. The group reports to Nord Pool's board of directors.

Since Nord Pool Spot is operating in a multilingual environment we have chosen English as our business language. That is why our website and most of our publications are made in English only. Please contact our local offices in your country.

You can download product sheets in pdf-format under product sheets to the right on this link.

Elspot:11XNORDPOOLSPOT2
Elbas:11XNPSPOT-ELBASW

The Elbas market is an intra day market where you can buy or sell your imbalances up until one hour before the delivery hour. Elbas is an easy tool for this purpose. It also gives and guarantees you automatic settlement the day after and may reduce your imbalance costs.

The fees for the participants in Elspot or Elbas are a yearly fee and volume based fees. For participants trading smaller volumes it is possible to waive the yearly fee and pay a higher volume fee instead. When trading in Elspot this is an economical solution for participants with a yearly volume smaller than 125 GWh. Fees for trading in Elspot and Elbas is found here. top

Agreements and contracts

No. A direct participant becomes a trading and clearing representative when signing  the Clearing Customer agreement to which company it will represent in trading. top

Elspot - products and trading

The flexible hourly bid is meant to help the market in strained effect situations leading to very high prices. The flexible one hour bid is a sales bid where the seller offers to either start generation or close down consumption for one hour at a certain (relatively high) price. The bid may be accepted in the hour with the highest price of the 24 hours for the next day. Such a sales offer may ease an otherwise difficult situation in the market.   

Either through EDIEL communication or through SESAM web. Information on SESAM web can be found here. 

Yes. The system price calculation and the area price calculation are two separate price calculation. Thus, different sets of blockbids are accepted in the two calculations. Sometimes block bids that are accepted in one of the calculations and not in the other gives a result where the system price is higher or lower than all area prices.

Every block bid influences the price – and in addition to the price condition the block bid needs to be included in the purchase or sales curve in order to be accepted. In a situation like this the block bid itself will influence the price so that the price condition would not have been fulfilled if it had been accepted in the calculation.

In SESAM web you can view all your bids and also retrieve your Elspot schedules and prices after price calculation is finished. More information found under trading applications & systems. You may also call to Elspot trading desk to confirm that your bids have been received, tlph: +47 67 52 80 10.

The reason for the division of Norway into several price areas is based on physical limitations in the grid capacities between different parts of Norway. The actual number of price areas can vary depending on the actual load situation. After a long period of two bidding areas in Norway Statnett introduced three bidding areas for the winter 06/07. Thus the price varies in different regions of Norway whereas in Finland and Sweden the price historically always has been the same for the whole country.

The capacity is still the property of the participant who bought it at the explicit auction. If it has not been utilized in Elspot – the participant is free to use the capacity acquired for own purposes. Learn more about CBO here. top

Elbas – products and trading

Elbas is currently available for physical trade in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany.

If you do not get a match to your bid in Elbas trading system because of for example limited liquidity it is OK that you call another Elbas participants to try to awaken them to match your bid in the system or to make a counter bid. During office hours you can also call the Elbas helpdesk at tlph number +47 67 52 80 10 to try to awaken the Elbas participants to put in bids to the trading system.
 
For the participant to match your bid, your bid has to naturally be either the best hourly bid for the hour in question or the best block bid of all the block bids which include the same hours and  the same volume as your bid. 

Currently we publish up to two years of historical data on the website.

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Settlement and collateral

Daily settlement was introduced in 2004 and replaced the weekly settlement period. The main advantage with this transition was that the buyers in the market had their collateral calls reduced by almost 70% thus freeing liquidity tied up in collateral calls to Nord Pool Spot.  For the sellers in the market the advantage is that they are now receiving their payments after 2-3 days instead of after 1 ½ week.

Nord Pool Spot cannot offer weekly based settlement. Please consult your bank for this service.

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Urgent Market Messages (UMM)

Within 60 minutes after the incident or the decision it taken. 60 min. rule does not apply between 8:00 pm and 07:00 am. In general an UMM should be sent if an incident, plan or change of plan concerns more than 100 MW – or if the incident or plan is likely to have a substantial impact on prices.

For new plans or changes to plans more than 6 weeks away an UMM should be sent if the change concerns more than 400 MW. If in doubt you should contact the Elspot trading desk via e-mail elspot@nordpool.net.  More information is also found in our rulebook.

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Market Conduct Rules

The Market Surveillance department at Nord Pool has registered several incidents where a company has conducted “internal” trades in Elbas across different price areas. Such trades enable companies to transfer volumes between different price areas. However, such trades can under certain circumstances be considered market manipulation.

The Market Conduct Rules Enclosure 2, section 1 a states:

“Market manipulation" shall mean

(a) Transactions or Orders to trade:

- which give, or are likely to give, false or misleading signals as to the supply of, demand for or price of a Instrument, or

-which secure, by a person, or persons acting in collaboration, the price of one or several Instruments at an abnormal or artificial level,

unless the person who entered into the transactions or issued the orders to trade establishes that his reasons for so doing are legitimate and that these transactions or orders to trade conform to accepted market practices as specified below.

An implication of the above is that the following may be considered as market manipulation:

The buyer and the seller agree on a price and volume bilaterally. In order to execute the deal in the market a sales order and a purchase order are placed almost simultaneously. Such behavior will hinder other market participants from reacting to the order being placed. Further, such trades will have the effect of fixing prices and also creates unfair trading conditions, as other traders are not given sufficient time to react to the order. In order to avoid such problems, other market participants must be given sufficient time to react to orders being placed. What is considered “sufficient time” must be seen in relation to the liquidity in the market, time of day etc. 

In addition to the above, market participants must not apply unreasonable business methods when carrying out Exchange trading, but always seek to act in accordance with good business conduct, according to Market Conduct Rules section 5.1.

The rules on insider trading as written in the Rulebook for Nord Pool’s Physical Markets appendix 6 – Market Conduct Rules - are applicable for both Elspot and Elbas trading.

According to section 3.1 in the Market Conduct Rules Participants and Clearing Customers may not place new Bids nor change or remove existing Bids in the Physical Markets while having insider information. Furthermore it is not permissible to actively enter into transactions. The prohibition to actively enter into transactions is mainly applicable for the Elbas Market and implies that it is not permissible to “hit” on other parties’ existing Bids. As it is not permissible to remove your own Bids, it is however OK to be the passive party in a transaction while having insider information.

In accordance with section 3.2 in the Market Conduct Rules, Participants and Clearing Customers may however perform Bidding on the Elspot Market pursuant to the Elspot Regulations when not taking into consideration the events mentioned in Enclosure 1 unless NPS as been notified of such information.

The general exceptions in section 3.3 and 3.4 apply to trading in both the Elspot Market and the Elbas Market.

Normal trading activity can again be performed as soon as the insider information is published through Urgent Market Message (UMM). This implies that it is not sufficient that an UMM has been sent, it must also have been published on the Nord Pool website before normal trading activity can be resumed. During night-time market participants can request access to send UMM’s directly from the UMM application to the market without any handling by Nord Pool Spot.

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