Implicit auctioning on the Kontek Cable: Third time lucky?

Implicit auctioning in Europe is about eliminating cross-border trade inefficiencies by internalizing cross-border trade into the day-ahead auction procedures of the Power Exchanges that are already organizing trade nationally. On the Kontek Cable, implicit auctioning has first been implemented with “no coupling” between the relevant Power Exchanges, followed by a “volume coupling” implementation, and finally a “one way price coupling” implementation that is still operational today. The main contribution of this paper is to compare the theoretical properties of these three implementations and to analyze their performance empirically. We find that the third implementation is significantly outperforming the previous two implementations, but in this third implementation stakeholders partly abandoned the “volume coupling” approach they initially believed to be a viable alternative and institutionally easier to implement.