Europe

Europe is realising its vision of a single internal electricity market, and APG is helping to create the foundation for this. APG operates the cross-zonal electricity lines without which there could be no import or export of electricity. It also provides the marketplace that enables Austrian electricity traders and customers to access the European electricity market. 

Since the end of the 1990s, the national electricity transmission grids across continental Europe have been converging to form a pan-European power grid. The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) includes five different synchronous areas (Nordic, Ireland, UK, Continental Europe, Baltic), 39 national transmission grids in 35 countries and provides more than 500 million people with a secure and reliable power supply.  

Coordinating all of these international grids poses great challenges. The integrated European power grid also brings many advantages, however, including an enormous enhancement in energy security in Europe. 

For example, if a major power plant or transmission line in the transmission system fails, the subsequent supply gap can be quickly filled in a cooperative effort, thus mitigating the risk of a variation in frequency, a drop in voltage (brownout) or even a total power outage (blackout). The greater the share of fluctuating supply in the grid (e.g. from wind farms), the more important it is to maintain a balanced grid and to safeguard grid operations via as many power plant units as possible. 

It’s only possible to run a transmission system when all of the participating grid operators follow the same rules. That is why grid operators in continental Europe previously agreed on common requirements and standards and signed a multilateral agreement (MLA) in which they undertook to comply with the Operation Handbook in which those requirements and standards were laid out. However, in order to extend the security rules uniformly to cover all key players in the power system (distribution system operators, power plant operators, major consumers) and all synchronous zones in Europe and to make rules more rigorously binding, the Operation Handbook was replaced a few years ago with EU legislation known as “network codes”. The remaining rules from the Operation Handbook for continental Europe were collated in April 2019 in the Synchronous Area Framework Agreement (SAFA) and also include the necessary agreements with non-EU countries which are part of ENTSO-E. 

In 1999, ETSO (European Transmission System Operators) was created as an association merging the four existing grid operator organisations in Europe (UCTE, NORDEL, ATSOI and UKTSOA) with the goal of better managing the new challenges arising from the open market. 

In July 2009, all of the above organisations were integrated into ENTSO-E as the umbrella organisation. UCTE continues to exist as the Regional Group Continental Europe, and remains the contact entity when any cross-regional coordination issues arise. APG also maintains close relationships with neighbouring grid operators in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Croatia.