The company Effekthandel and 49 energy producers that supply reserve capacity to the electricity system in Western Denmark have violated the Competition Act by illegally coordinating prices and bids at auctions. The Danish Competition Council writes this in a press release.
According to Christian Schultz, chairman of the Danish Competition Council, the plants entered into an agreement with Effekthandel that the company would be responsible for their pricing at the auctions.
- There is documentation that the agreement was entered into with a view to raising the price of reserve capacity. The fact that the prices were coordinated in and by Effekthandel, and that the 49 plants thus did not talk to each other directly about prices and bids, does not change the fact that they have participated in an illegal agreement that restricts competition between competitors, he says in the press release.
During the auctions, the supply of the so-called mFFR (Manual Frequency Restoration Reserve) was traded. The winners of the auction will be entitled to send electricity into the system on an hourly basis if there is a risk of an imbalance in it.
The state-owned energy infrastructure company Energinet is the buyer of the extra electricity. The company operates the electricity system and is responsible for ensuring that there is electricity in the sockets of citizens.
Took place for three years
The 49 plants agreed with Effekthandel that it would set the price for the bids that the plants submitted at the auctions.
The evidence in the case shows that the 49 plants are part of a joint pooling scheme, where Effekthandel informed about the coordinated trade in emails. Here it also appeared that the purpose of the pool was to raise prices in the market.
In addition, emails were also sent out about the individual power plants' registered capacity and a distribution key for each power plant's payments for selling extra electricity to the electricity system.
The power plants were therefore paid regardless of whether their bid won an auction or not, because Effekthandel distributed the revenue from the auctions between the power plants based on the capacity they had registered. The energy trading company itself received a commission from the works' earnings.
The violation of the Competition Act took place in the period from September 2019 to at least August 2022, writes the Competition Council.
According to Jens Gormsen, head of department at the Competition Centre for Construction, Energy and Transport, the council will now decide what to do.
- The Competition Council will now decide whether the case should be brought to the courts with a view to issuing a fine, he tells Ritzau.
/ritzau/
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