EPEX Spot and the European Energy Exchange (EEX) will launch a new European Electricity Index. Referred to as ELIX, the new index will be based on the actual market orders in the EPEX Spot auction for the market areas France, Germany/Austria and Switzerland.
ELIX will be calculated in an auction based on the aggregated bid/offer curves of the existing market areas and the rules of EPEX Spot. ELIX is equal to the uncongested price, which means a price under the hypothesis of unlimited cross-border capacity between these market areas. Similar to the existing day ahead market results it will be calculated for every hour of the delivery day. In addition, the average value for base (ELIX Day Base) and peak hours (ELIX Day Peak) will be calculated and published.
Starting from 18 October 2010, EPEX Spot and EEX will publish the ELIX on a daily basis shortly after the publication of the national auction results. The index will be available to the public on www.epexspot.com and www.eex.com.
ELIX is based on the objective of a truly integrated, single European market. Hence, it will show the remaining additional benefit which could be achieved through further market integration. The market areas France, Germany/Austria and Switzerland stand for 36 percent of the Pan-European electricity consumption. National prices determined in those market areas are already used as reference prices across Europe. ELIX displays how close those prices already are to a market price in a fully integrated European market. Therefore, the index addresses the energy trading community and market stakeholders as well as political decision makers and the general public. They all are invited by EPEX Spot and EEX to use ELIX as the reference price for the European energy market.