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Is the publication on market participant’s own website the sufficient discharge of the disclosure obligation on wholesale energy market?
In non-binding ‘Guidance on the application of the definitions set out in Article 2 of Regulation (EU) No 1227/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2011 on wholesale energy market integrity and transparency’ 1st Edition of 20 December 2011
(http://www.acer.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/ACER_HOME/Activities/REMIT- hereinafter referred to as: ‘Guidelines’) the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) have spent certain effort on disclosing the particulars for the issue that appear currently to be most urgent for entities covered by the scope of REMIT i.e. publication requirement with respect to inside information.
It was clear even before the issuing of Guidelines that, as ACER underlined in general, inside information should be disclosed in a manner ensuring that it is capable of being disseminated to as wide a public as possible.
It also does not rise doubts that currently we have not in place a common transparency platform dedicated specifically to REMIT purposes (which disclosure mechanism is given priority in the ACER Guidelines). Considering that among obligations applying from 28 December 2011 is also the obligation to publish inside information, the question may arise, how to cope with this regulatory requirement at present.
Generally it appears that electricity generators have currently three major possibilities: first - publishing through pre-existing Transmission System Operator arrangements (however this channel seems not to be exhaustive with respect to the full scope of the publication requirements), second – exploiting transparency platforms made available by some energy exchanges and, third - using market participants’ own website.
As regards the first two publication channels (TSO’s and exchange’s platforms) there is, however, the preliminary question to decide whether the scope and the time-limits for publication are consistent with REMIT. The determination for this issue will depend on specific national and internal arrangements governing the disclosure regime for specific TSO and exchange. It should also be, however, born in mind that if a market participant wished to trade on inside information and the date scheduled for publication on the TSO platform not yet came, he might be forced to make earlier publication on his own website.
With respect to the first possibility (the publication on the TSO website) the Guidelines refer to Annex I to the Regulation (Guidelines on the Management and Allocation of Available Transfer Capacity of Interconnections Between National Systems), which among the information that the TSOs are obliged to publish lists ex-ante information on planned outages and ex-post information for the previous day on planned and unplanned outages of generation units larger than 100 MW.