The National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission (NEURC) held an emergency meeting to stabilize the electricity market after prices plummeted on the day-ahead segment, the regulator reported on July 5.
The price crash on July 2-4 was caused by falling demand from electricity buyers who wield significant market power, including the company D.Trading, which is part of oligarch Rinat Akhmetov’s energy conglomerate DTEK.
Ukraine’s energy market, which was launched on July 1, 2019, has four segments: two-way deals, the day-ahead market, the same-day market and the emergency balancing market. On the day-ahead market, participants buy and sell electricity for the following day at binding prices.
NEURC ordered the country’s grid operators to buy enough electricity on the day-ahead market to compensate for losses.
The regulator also imposed a limit on how much electricity a producer can sell to a company that’s part of the same vertically-integrated business. It must not exceed half of a producer’s monthly electricity sales.
Finally, the regulator set a price floor, below which market participants are not allowed to bid until July 8.
The regulator is also investigating the market situation to determine what happened on July 2-4.
“First, we are starting an investigation of what happened on the day-ahead market. We must study all aspects of this, including suspicious DTEK generation auctions and all subsequent actions on June 29,” NEURC head Valeriy Tarasiuk said at the meeting.
