The Nordic TSOs held an informal public consultation during August 2025 to collect input from market participants. 22 market participants responded to the informal consultation. The Nordic TSOs are very thankful, that market participants spent the time answering the questions, such development work on the TSO side can be planned according to priorities among market participants.
The informal consultation consulted two themes:
- Bid formats
- 15-minute MTU in the aFRR and mFRR capacity markets
Responses of course differed a lot, but the key take-aways can be summarized to the following when it comes to changing bid formats:
- No appetite for large changes in bid formats
- Market participants suggests that bilateral TSO-meetings will help to change behavior, educating market participants in better usage and understanding of existing bid formats
- Don’t Nordic TSOs should be careful of not implementing solutions that makes the task of supplying balancing capacity more complex and more time consuming
- Market participants want clear price signals and honest bidding behavior, but no radical changes. This could from TSO-side be seen as somewhat of a contradiction, since less transparent price signals and bidding behavior potentially not based on underlying costs are the exact reason for evaluating the existing bid formats
On the theme of 15-minute MTU in the aFRR and mFRR capacity markets responses can be summarized to the following:
- Few market participants see no value in changing to 15-minute MTU
- Most market participants would like the different market timeframes to operate in the same time resolution
- Few market participants want the change to 15-minute MTU to happen as soon as possible/be given high priority
- With the existing technology mix among balancing capacity suppliers), the capacity available is not expected to change radically with 15-minute MTU
With respect to the informal consultation, the Nordic TSOs conclude, that now is not the time to change bid formats. The Nordic TSOs will try to teach and educate market participants better via bilateral meetings. The Nordic TSOs is still convinced, that the new bid format based on cost types can be a solution, if bilateral meetings and increased awareness fail with changing the current bidding behavior. However, it should also be communicated rather clearly, that no changes mean higher risk of paradoxically rejected bids and hence unclear price signals.
The informal consultation has not given rise to the Nordic TSOs changing the plan for implementing 15-minute MTU, which means that an implementation timeline will be decided on as part of the implementation of the European harmonization of cross-border balancing capacity markets.
The Nordic TSOs are working on a complete plan for upcoming changes – both changes in the Nordic markets but also changes that will follow from the implementation of the European harmonization of cross-border balancing capacity markets. The idea is to create a condensed plan for the future, such that the plan contains all the changes, that market participants can expect and therefore plan from in their own implementation. In the plan it will also be clear, what calls for methodology changes and what is already captured in the existing Nordic methodology framework and in the European framework.
The changes expected to come relates to discussions on elastic demand, hybrid pricing models, co-optimized clearing between aFRR and mFRR, potential changes in the forecasting of the value of Cross Zonal Capacity, implementation of flow-based in the capacity markets and then as mentioned above the implementation of 15-minute MTUs. Not all changes will necessarily demand changes on the market participant side, but market results and outcome will be affected by it.