Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Bratislava

18^th March 2021

The Nominated Electricity Market Operators (NEMOs) and Transmission System Operators (TSOs) from Austria, Germany, Poland and the 4M Market Coupling (4M MC) countries, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, hereby inform stakeholders about the slight update of the test planning of the project.

As communicated earlier, the first phase of joint regional testing (Full Integration Testing - FIT) has started successfully at the end of January 2021. The next phase of the testing (Simulation Integration Testing – SIT) focusing on the testing of regional operational procedures will start in the second half of March 2021, meaning a couple of weeks later than originally planned due to some local implementation constraints.

Therefore, project parties have updated the test planning and also aligned it with all European TSOs and NEMOs at the SDAC level with the aim to avoid conflict with other ongoing parallel projects, such as the Greek-Bulgarian Coupling. As a result, the regional tests are now expected to be completed by the beginning of May 2021, which will be followed by end-to-end procedural tests at a wider European level, together with all parties of the Single Day-ahead Market Coupling (SDAC). The Member Tests with the participation of market participants is now envisaged to be carried out in the second half of May 2021 and after confirmation of technical and legal readiness, the go-live is planned for June 2021.

In order to provide market participants with detailed information about the Member Tests, as well as about the expected changes in current processes, a joint webinar is expected to be organized by the project in due time before the foreseen Member Tests. Market participants will receive details about the planned webinar in a separate communication note.

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The DE-AT-PL-4M MC Project also referred to as Interim Coupling aims to connect the borders of 4M MC with the Multi-Regional Coupling (MRC) by introducing Net Transmission Capacity based (NTC-based) implicit capacity allocation on six borders (PL-DE, PL-CZ, PL-SK, CZ-DE, CZ-AT, HU-AT). This will mark the start of the so-called “enduring phase” of SDAC, during which there will be one European Single Day-Ahead Coupling only, where MRC and 4M MC are coupled.

Information about the webinar can be found HERE and press release HERE in PDF format.