Integration of Central West Europe spot electricity markets: An update

This paper aims to assess the level of integration of the Central-West Europe (CWE: Germany - EEX, France - Powernext, the Netherlands - APX, Belgium - BPX and Luxembourg) regional electricity spot markets created under the initiative launched by the European Regulators Group for Electricity and Gas and essential to comply with the targets set in the Florence Regulatory Forum. As always, the integration of the European Central-West regional electricity spot markets relies on the physical interconnection between the transmission systems. Development of interconnection capacities within the region has been pursued as reported by the different Transmission System Operators, recognising that interconnection capacity is considered to be a critical factor to ensure market integration. Electricity spot market integration in the CWE region was appraised by assessing day-ahead spot electricity prices (from 1^st of January 2007 to the 31^st December 2012) in each spot market. Taking into consideration the adoption of the market coupling mechanism between EEX and the trilateral Pow ern ext, APX and BPX on the 9^th of November 2010, a structural break in the data was evaluated through Granger-cause and impulse response analysis undertaken based on econometric models. To the best of our knowledge this approach is the first to perform a detailed analysis grounded on several econometric models to trace the effects of the introduction of the market coupling mechanism.