Balance II.
More variations on a theme. No news on the aFFR insider trading investigation. The exception that is needed to maintain the rule(s)? Should the German system relax?
Balance is an intriguing theme in life and in the energy markets. We all know what it feels like to be off-balance, out-of-kilter and part of what makes our energy system fascinating is that it is all based on the need for balance and the whole system dances to the music of this balance, which we can ‘listen’ to with the data available to us. We continue from Part I.

Earlier in the year we were thinking about the aFFR insider trading debate in Germany, which is about the extent to which signals from a market that only some market participants have access to are being used for Intra-Day trading strategies. What has happened since then? I asked some LLM applications and they all cite Montel and a strange niche publication called ‘Stratnergy’…
To recap: real-time signals from the secondary frequency reserves (aFFR / SRL) are available to the “pre-qualified providers” of frequency stabilisation services, many of whom are also active in the spot markets. The activation data is published more widely with a delay of around 5-15 mins.