Organization and functioning of liberalized electricity markets: An overview of the Dutch market

Abstract In this paper, we examine the organization and the functioning of the Dutch electricity market. First we describe the organization of the Dutch electricity supply chain and the role of the main market participants including the transmission system operator, distribution system operators, program responsible parties and metering companies. We then describe the organization of financial trading and clearing mechanism of electricity through the organized futures exchange (The European Energy Derivatives Exchange), and the spot market (Amsterdam Power Exchange) which includes the day-ahead market and intra-day markets. We also detail the functioning of the imbalance market and reserve capacity management in the Netherlands. Through a set of numerical analysis, we provide an exploratory analysis of the APX day-ahead spot prices and the real-time imbalance prices using electricity price data from 2002 to 2013. We observe the price spikes both in the day-ahead and imbalance markets usually occur around 6-10 AM and 5-7 PM. We also observe that in the imbalance market system overages happen significantly more often than shortages pointing out that the market tends to buy more than what is demanded. This could be explained by the risk attitude of the market participants in the imbalance market.