IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2020 - 32

First, NorNed capacity was auctioned, and thereafter energy
trades had to take place in the market on both sides of the
interconnector. This two-step execution was not optimal,
and in several cases, it led to power flowing in the wrong
direction, from a high-price area to a low-price one.
During the first years of NorNed operation, work continued to establish an implicit auction for the trade through
the cable. In January 2011, a successful implicit auction for
NorNed was held via the European Market Coupling Company, Hamburg, Germany. This was a so-called tight volume coupling, which meant that the volume flowing across
NorNed was decided based on all the information from the
markets on both sides. Thereafter, the power exchanges on
both sides would recalculate their prices in their own region,
with the NorNed volume being fixed.
The transaction possibilities across NorNed were
expanded when intraday trading was introduced in March
2012. In February 2014, the day-ahead markets in northwestern Europe were successfully coupled, enabling electricity
to be traded from France to Finland according to a common
day-ahead electricity price calculation based on an implicit
auction. Since then, the green areas in Figures 2 and 3 have
been one common market. This laid the foundation for
multiregional coupling, and in 2014 May, the northwestern
Europe region was coupled with southwestern Europe, linking markets and TSOs all the way to Portugal.

(a)

Since November 2015, the day-ahead market clearing
has been handling implicit losses, increasing the capacity
given to the market. Physical losses caused by the power
transmission through the cable are included while determining the power flow, avoiding certain hours where the losses
exceed the value created by trades. In June 2018, the Europewide cross-border intraday (XBID) solution was launched.
NorNed was included, and the previous intraday solution
was exchanged by XBID.
The availability of the NorNed cable from its commissioning until the end of 2015 was 89%, and the result can be seen
in Figure 5. The time to recover the NorNed investment cost
of roughly €600 million was slightly fewer than eight years.
It can be seen from the availability curve that there has been a
number of longer outages on NorNed. This relates to a limited
number of large disturbances. In 2009, there were two disruptions: a fault on the land cable in Eemshaven in February and
a fire in the ac switchyard in Eemshaven in April. The longest outage was caused by a cable fault during the winter of
2010. Another cable fault occurred during the spring of 2011.
In October 2013, a storm damaged the roof of the converter
building in Eemshaven and caused water damage.
Figure 6 shows the average amount of energy (gigawatt
hour) flowing across NorNed (orange curve) and the average
price difference between the day-ahead market price in Feda
minus the average day-ahead market price in Eemshaven

(b)

(c)

figure 4. The NorNed converter stations and cable installation. (a) Eemshaven, (b) Feda, and (c) laying the NorNed cable.

100
80

(%)

60
40
20
0
2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

figure 5. The availability of NorNed per week (May 2008-December 2015).
32

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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2020

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