No legal barriers to cross-border electricity trading in no-deal Brexit scenario
1st November 2018 | Commercial Energy
National Grid has given assurances there will be no legal barriers to continued cross-border electricity trading in the case of a no-deal Brexit. However, the company warned recent changes to day-ahead trading arrangements will have to be rolled back if the UK leaves the EU without a withdrawal agreement. Planned reforms to intraday trading arrangements will also need to be scrapped.
Speaking at a media briefing at the UK converter station for the BritNed interconnector to the Netherlands, National Grid interconnectors regulation manager Mark Duffield, said, “We’ve done quite a lot of internal analysis. We’ve also commissioned external opinions from a couple of law firms. They’ve been, and we’ve been and actually the government has been quite clear that there isn’t any kind of legal right or obligation that exists for interconnectors to have to be switched off.”
Cross-border electricity
He continued, “At the highest level, we’re linking two national markets and those national markets will still exist as they currently do in their own right. There’ll still be a Dutch power market. There’ll still be a UK power market post-Brexit. They will still operate in their own national ways. The interconnectors will still have a connection agreement in the UK under a UK framework. It will still have a connection agreement in the Netherlands under a Dutch framework. We’ll still have the right to import or export under those physical connection agreements.
“The key thing is how we monetise that link,” he added. “We’ve got the physical right to flow between two nations. It’s making sure that the commercial arrangements still work and still allow people who want to flow to buy power in one market, sell it into another market and then secure the interconnected capacity to balance off that position.”
Duffield said the main issue in this regard is the day-ahead trading of interconnector capacity.
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