Day-ahead coordinated cross-border capacity calculation on the Italian Northern borders

Launched with the support of the European Commission, the EU Regional Initiatives are in a full developing phase after the signature of the Third Package and the commitment of EU member states to promote and enhance security of the interconnected operation. In this context, Transmission System Operators of the Italian Northern Borders (APG, ELES, RTE, Swissgrid and TERNA) launched in 2012 a common project for the implementation of a daily process for D-2 cross-border capacity computation on the Italian Northern Borders (FR-IT, CH-IT, AT-IT, SI-IT) in line with the Guidelines on Capacity Allocation and Congestion Management. The project aims at implementing on the Italian Northern Borders a coordinated NTC daily re-computation process in D-2, based on the latest available information from the interconnected system, in order to provide optimized cross-border capacities for the day-ahead market. Expected benefits from this NTC re-calculation process in D-2 are a more accurate network security assessment and an optimized cross-border NTC with respect to the current yearly computation process. The daily cross-border capacity calculation process will provide, in this first stage, NTC values in import direction to Italy. NTC values in export direction from Italy will be added in a later stage, their computation methodology being presently under evaluation. With the purpose to re-compute on a daily basis NTCs in direction to Italy, Italian Borders parties successfully completed the prototyping phase, which aimed at defining a capacity calculation methodology and developing needed processes. The Testing phase consists of three steps: - the internal dry run, with the purpose to tune algorithms and tools. This phase started in February 2014 and is now completed - the external dry run, with the aim of providing market participants with the opportunity to acquire sensitivity and experience about this new process. This phase is starting on 2015 July 30th. Resulting NTCs will be published daily under the Italian North Borders section in the « Resource center » of the CASC.EU web site (www.casc.eu) but they are not used for allocation purposes. Market participants can send feedbacks to the email address d2ntc-nib@casc.eu, - the full live test: with the aim of confirming whether the new daily computed NTCs are suitable for operation by TSOs. Resulting NTCs will be used for allocation purposes. This phase is expected to start in November 2015. After the successful completion of the full live test, Transmission System Operators of the Italian Northern Borders will communicate the effective Go-live date.