Hamburg, 30 September 2025 – At 12:00 noon today, the German-Luxembourg bidding zone saw its first Day-Ahead auction based on 15-minute products for delivery on 1 October 2025. Instead of 24 hourly blocks, the new market standard in European power trading now consists of 96 quarter-hour intervals. The shift implements the European requirement set out in the Electricity Balancing Guideline (EBGL) and the Clean Energy Package, which mandate the harmonisation of the imbalance settlement period to 15 minutes.
The go-live proceeded largely without incident. Only a brief delay in the publication of market results caused some short-lived unease. Nevertheless, all orders were processed successfully, and coupling with European partner exchanges was completed as planned.
Market participants embraced the new product format immediately, and the intended cross-product matching worked as designed: traditional hourly profiles can still be structured as block orders, while additional liquidity and competition are emerging in the new quarter-hour segments.
In total, traded volume reached 801 GWh, compared with 763 GWh in yesterday’s final auction under the pure hourly regime. This represents a modest increase of 5% and underlines that market participants have adopted the new format.
The first auction produced a differentiated set of price signals. While the average across all 96 quarter-hours came in at €116.6/MWh, the most expensive interval (19:00–19:15) cleared at €408.5/MWh, and the cheapest during the solar peak (11:45–12:00) at €61.4/MWh. The steepest shift between two adjacent intervals (18Q3 and 18Q4) reached €96/MWh, reflecting the pronounced evening ramp.
To the surprise of some participants, the familiar “zig-zag” pattern observed by traders during ramping periods in intraday trading also emerged in the Day-Ahead 15-minute auction. For example, despite rising demand and falling solar output, the price slipped from €116.7/MWh in 16Q4 to €85.5/MWh in 17Q1. Whereas hourly prices tend to move more smoothly, quarter-hourly results today showed the same intraday-style pattern that market participants have long known.
Results of the first Day-Ahead auction with 15-minute products and the corresponding average hourly prices for delivery on 1 October 2025
The launch of the 15-minute auction is seen as a key step toward deeper integration of renewable energy. More precise price signals are also expected to bring flexibility options such as storage and demand response more actively into the market, while reducing balancing costs.
Amani Joas, founder and managing director of FlexPower, one of Germany’s leading traders of renewable electricity, commented on the change in market design:
“With the adjustment of the Day-Ahead market design, additional liquidity is emerging in quarter-hour contracts, strengthening competition and ultimately creating added value for consumers. It is comparable to technical standards in other industries: if Germany had its own USB standard and France another, the market would fragment. Only by agreeing on common standards can broad competition take place, leading to more efficient prices. For the upcoming auctions, we therefore expect liquidity in quarter-hour products to broaden step by step. In the medium term, we anticipate a price structure that responds more rationally to the changing supply from wind, solar and conventional generation on the one hand, and to quarter-hourly variable demand on the other—particularly during ramping periods.”
Contact
For more information, please contact:
FlexPower GmbH | Jasmina Utzat | Communications | jutzat@flex-power.energy