Launch of PRISMA EU Capacity Announced at FLAME 2013

Fluxys Belgium, sister company Fluxys TENP and seventeen other Transmission System Operators (TSOs) have announced the launch of the new PRISMA European Capacity Platform on 1 April 2013 at the FLAME conference.

From that day, day-ahead capacity at various European interconnection points in seven countries will be offered through the platform. The first monthly auctions will take place on 15 April 2013. The announcement of the TSOs comes less than a year after signing a Memorandum of Understanding at last year’s Flame Conference. The auctioning of the cross-border transport capacity complies with ENTSOG’s Network Code on Capacity Allocation Mechanisms (NC CAM), the future market rules for allocating transport capacity.

Philip Lowe, Director General for Energy of the European Commission: “The creation of the PRISMA joint capacity platform is a major step towards creating the EU internal gas market. It proves that when European network operators work closely together towards a joint goal and bundle their experience, the involved partners can succeed in implementing the future European market rules already two years ahead of its time.”

Over the past months the cooperating TSOs have worked closely together to create a joint platform. As an initial step, 19 TSOs from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands became shareholders of PRISMA European Capacity Platform GmbH on 1 January 2013. Today, more than 250 European shippers with around 600 users are registered to PRISMA primary.

Moreover, and as a further step towards an integrated European gas market, the current PRISMA partners welcomed the Polish TSO Gaz-System S.A. to PRISMA, who has agreed to conduct a pilot project for providing bundled capacity at the Polish-German interconnection point Lasow on the PRISMA platform. Thus, quarterly capacity for three quarters of 2014 will be jointly offered by the two TSOs Gaz-System S.A. (Poland) and ONTRAS (Germany) through the platform in mid 2013.

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LNG World News Staff, March 14, 2013; Image: PRISMA Capacity EU