BritNed launches
Buy Now

Developed by BritNed, and enabled by Empire, Buy Now is the first Dutch-style interconnector auction of its kind. It launched on 2 April 2024, offering capacity primarily in 5MW offers.

BritNed has launched the Buy Now auction, a pioneering interconnector capacity auction, enabling participants to instantly secure a predetermined amount of explicit Intraday capacity.

Developed by BritNed, and enabled by Empire, Buy Now is the first Dutch-style interconnector auction of its kind and enables participants to acquire capacity before, during, and after the regular Intraday auctions, providing participants with additional flexibility and certainty of securing capacity.

In the first 7 days of operation, Buy Now allocated 1984MW of Intraday capacity. Capacity was primarily sold in 5MW offers, with the lowest offer secured at €0.08 MW. Capacity was secured closer to the delivery period than possible with regular Intraday auctions on most occasions, including capacity being secured just 9 minutes before the closure of the Nomination gate (11:41 CEST for MTU 14).

Buy Now auctions are offered for every hour of the day, in both directions, providing there is sufficient Available Transfer Capacity (ATC). Auctions are aligned with BritNed’s four Intraday allocation windows but begin prior to and continue after the respective Intraday auction. Buy Now auctions open 30 minutes ahead the standard Intraday auctions and continue to run (if the capacity is not purchased), until just five minutes before the Nomination Gate closure of that hour.

Nils Teipel, Commercial Operations & Planning Manager at BritNed said: “Buy Now is the first auction of its kind and gives participants much greater flexibility, convenience, and control by facilitating trades much closer to the delivery period than has ever been possible previously.

“When the Buy Now offer is published, the price will automatically begin to decrease from the starting price in equal price steps every 15 seconds. The first participant that selects the purchase button on the Empire interface, or issues the respective API call, will acquire the offered capacity at its current price. The longer the auction continues without the capacity being purchased, the further the price will decrease.

He explained: “Participants can acquire Transmission Rights before the regular Intraday auction, therefore, capacity can be secured in advance, alongside acquiring Transmission Rights after the regular Intraday auction and during the open nomination gate.”

The launch of Buy Now comes just six months after BritNed released Empire, a the next-generation allocation and nomination platform. Empire replaced three legacy systems, providing an integrated approach to trading and enables users to manage their entire BritNed trading portfolio from one platform. Since its launch on 19^th September 2023, Empire has allocated 14753GW of Day Ahead and Intraday capacity, and 19398GW of Long Term capacity. The total Flow that was instructed by Empire during that period was 2398GWh, which is equivalent to powering approximately 1.4M households every single hour.

Teipel continued: “Buy Now is only possible because of the success of Empire. Empire was designed using a modular approach with advanced technologies, ensuring it can be tailored to customer’s sophisticated workflows, whilst removing technical bottlenecks to enable BritNed to deliver new innovations to the market at pace – such as the innovative Buy Now auction.

Buy Now is borne from that success and is the next step in BritNed’s mission to improve capacity trading while delivering unprecedented levels of performance and productivity in the interconnector industry.

We are dedicated to innovation and developing solutions that prioritise not only the needs of our customers but can also be specifically tailored to their sophisticated operations and workflows.

• IMMEDIATELY SECURE CAPACITY: Participants receive immediate notification of the successful acquisition of Transmission Rights
• TRADE CLOSER TO THE DELIVERY PERIOD: Participants can acquire capacity before, during, and after the regular Intraday auctions, up to five minutes before the Nomination Gate closure
• GREATER CLARITY ON TRADING COSTS: Buy Now auction provides exact clarity on cost of securing Transmission Rights
• NO ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS: Existing BritNed customers can participate, but like any other auction, Buy Now does require sufficient credit limit
• TRADE WITHIN YOUR WORKFLOW: Participate in Buy Now auctions either on Empire, or via API

Contact the team on customer.enquiries@britned.com to learn more about Buy Now auctions.