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by probablypower 941 days ago
It is a pretty fundamental flaw in market implementation if producers can bid significantly more than they can physically provide. We (other European country grid operator) run checks on every submitted market order to ensure it is both physically reasonable and that there is equivalent resources on the market to buy/sell to the order. Hopefully the market operator can learn from this mistake in giving market participants such a large foot gun.
5 comments

You don't even need to worry about what someone can physically provide. All bids by market participants can (arguably should) be checked for extreme outliers. A bid of multiple GW from a participant that usually only trades hundreds of MW should immediately set off alarms. It only takes a phone call like "hey, are you sure about this?"
If I understand correctly the bidders here don't produce any electricity. They are literally middlemen taking a cut with some, apparently not so fancy, "financial instruments".

There's rarely much reasonable going on in markets, especially when they get financialized.

Shouldn't they default on their delivery and have a punishment by the other market participants? Unless of course a more reasonable bargaining situation can solve it.
Wouldn't them defaulting without countermeasures being in place mean the power goes out?

Hard to have an appropriate punishment for the deaths and damage that would cause.

Why can't they just remove the wrong bid from the market? And redo the auction or use a reasonable average?

It seems they treat this as an irreversible mistake.

Nordpool rejected this proposal because it would affect electricity markets abroad. But who knows what really happens under the veneer of PR.

Finnish grid officials are calling for this to be possible in the future.

> It is a pretty fundamental flaw in market implementation if producers can bid significantly more than they can physically provide.

Well, many have been saying this same things about the "solar revolution"...