Effect trading, 46 combined heat and power plants and 3 regulating power plants will be brought before the courts at the request of the Competition Council with a view to issuing fines. The council states this in a press release.
The reason is that the Competition Council has summoned Effect trading and the 49 plants, based on the decision that the council itself made on 25 October, where the council concluded that Effect trading and the plants have illegally coordinated prices and bids when they participated in auctions for electricity reserves in the state-owned Energinet. All plants are located in Western Denmark, and the case concerns the so-called mFRR auctions.
The Competition Council's decision of 25 October 2023 has not yet been published, as the publication is pending clarification of confidentiality issues. But in a press release when the Competition Council announced the case, Christian Schultz, chairman of the Competition Council, stated the following:
- 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 speak directly to each other about prices and bids, does not change the fact that they have participated in an illegal agreement that limits competition between competitors, he said.
Spanned over three years
According to the council, the evidence in the case shows that the 49 plants were part of a joint pooling scheme for a period from September 2019 to at least August 2022, where Effekthandel informed about the coordinated trade in emails. It also appeared here 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 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. Effekthandel itself received a commission from the power plants' earnings.
The power plants' industry organization does not believe that the power plants have deliberately acted illegally.
- They have asked the authorities whether this model was OK. They have not been given the green light for that, but they have not been told that they were not allowed to do so either. That's why they have gone out and sought external legal advice, which has concluded that this model is within the framework of laws and regulations, said Head of Press and Communications at Dansk Fjernvarme Rune Birk Nielsen when the case came to light in October.
But that excuse has not made the Competition Council drop taking the case to the civil courts.
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