REMIT and unavailability notices

Regulation (EU) No 1227/2011 on wholesale energy market integrity and transparency, known by its acronym REMIT, requires in Article 4 that anyone participating in the market — including a plant operator — publicly disclose, effectively and without delay, any inside information it holds about its facilities. A change in generation availability, planned or not, is the central example of that duty: it is exactly the kind of fact that moves the wholesale price of electricity.

On the continent, that disclosure duty runs through one common technical channel: Article 15 of Regulation (EU) No 543/2013 requires transmission system operators to collect and publish, through ENTSO-E's Transparency Platform, the unavailability of generation units of 100 MW or more, no later than an hour after the fact becomes known. Each notice follows a fixed format — unit, location, installed capacity, capacity available during the event, reason, and start and estimated end dates — rather than a free-form press release.

Notices come in two kinds. A planned one is an outage or reduction the operator scheduled and announced ahead of time: a refueling, a maintenance outage. An unplanned, or forced, one is one that starts without notice — a trip or a scram — and is published as soon as it is known, because it is the kind most likely to move price expectations. A later revision to an already-published notice, moving the return date earlier or later, is published the same way and can itself be the more price-relevant event.

The United Kingdom, after leaving the European Union, kept its own version of REMIT in domestic law, and its operators publish the same kind of notice through Elexon's BMRS instead of ENTSO-E's platform.

Reactor Atlas turns each notice into a signal by its type: a full, unannounced loss of output reads as a forced outage; an announced full outage, as a planned outage; a partial reduction, as a derate; and a revision that moves an already-published notice's return date, as an extended outage. The sources are ENTSO-E's Transparency Platform, covering the zones of France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Switzerland, Bulgaria and Romania, and Elexon BMRS for the United Kingdom.