Organization and functioning of liberalized electricity markets: An overview of the Dutch market

Through a set of numerical analysis, we provide an exploratory analysis of the APX day-ahead spot prices and the real-time imbalance prices using electricity price data from 2002 to 2013. We observe the price spikes both in the day-ahead and imbalance markets usually occur around 6-10 AM and 5-7 PM. We also observe that in the imbalance market system overages happen significantly more often than shortages pointing out that the market tends to buy more than what is demanded. This could be explained by the risk attitude of the market participants in the imbalance market.