The European Commission has adopted a decision imposing transmission system operator (TSO) TenneT to increase the electricity trading capacity between Western Denmark and Germany and to ensure a specific guaranteed capacity available at all times. This announcement ends the formal investigation opened in March 2018 to check whether TenneT infringed EU antitrust rules by systematically limiting southward capacity at the power interconnection between the two countries.
According to the European Commission, concerns were raised about TenneT's possible discrimination against non-German electricity producers, preventing the export of cheap electricity from the Nordic countries, where it is largely generated from renewable energy sources such as wind and hydropower.
Following the opening of the formal antitrust investigation, TenneT committed to guarantee a minimum hourly capacity of 1,300 MW on the Western Denmark-Germany interconnector (around 75% of its technical capacity), to be reached following a 6-month implementation phase, and to progressively increase the guaranteed hourly capacity to 2,625 MW by January 2026 following the planned expansion of two interconnection projects located between Western Denmark and Germany in 2020 (labelled as the East Coast Line project) and 2022 (the West Coast Line project), respectively. The European Commission has made these commitments legally-binding over a 9-year period and TenneT will be allowed to reduce the capacity below the minimum guaranteed level only in a very limited number of exceptional circumstances.