Time zones get in the way of Romanian power trading
ANRE, the energy regulator in Romania, has an interesting way of trading electric power. Its power exchange operates on Central European Time, whereas its over-the-counter platform operates on Eastern European Time. This is because the power exchange is part of the 4M market (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia) which has standardized on CET, whereas the OTC platform is based on the local time in Romania. As a result, a participant who trades a day ahead on the Romanian OTC platform can be caught out of balance if they attempt to clear their position on the exchange. ANRE says the cost of shifting their OTC platform to CET would exceed the benefits of simpler access to the markets. In the meantime, it would seem that there are interesting time-zone-based arbitrage opportunities in Romanian power trading (or maybe opportunities for anti-arbitrage? :-). These are all 24-hour markets. Dumb question: why don't they standardize on UTC? Udubasceanu S. Romanian regulator to maintain time-zone split across power trading platforms. ICIS 2015-10-15 <http://www.icis.com/resources/news/2015/10/15/9933560/romanian-regulator-to-...>
Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote: |ANRE, the energy regulator in Romania, has an interesting way of trading |These are all 24-hour markets. Dumb question: why don't th\ |ey standardize on UTC? In the romanian countryside there still exist small villages where people get personalized colourized wooden tombstones; personalized in sofar as the wood carver lived together with the person for many years or even decades, so that the text reflects the living of the person ("was known for loving the men", "could have lived longer but unfortunately his own schnaps was the best", but in real, living and soulful speech). Then again i'm hoping for local fuel cells, wind and water mills, solar cells, geothermics, to name a few, and hope the businesskids start using Monopoly money. --steffen
Paul Eggert wrote:
ANRE, the energy regulator in Romania, has an interesting way of trading electric power. Its power exchange operates on Central European Time, whereas its over-the-counter platform operates on Eastern European Time. This is because the power exchange is part of the 4M market (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia) which has standardized on CET, whereas the OTC platform is based on the local time in Romania.
As a result, a participant who trades a day ahead on the Romanian OTC platform can be caught out of balance if they attempt to clear their position on the exchange. ANRE says the cost of shifting their OTC platform to CET would exceed the benefits of simpler access to the markets. In the meantime, it would seem that there are interesting time-zone-based arbitrage opportunities in Romanian power trading (or maybe opportunities for anti-arbitrage? :-).
These are all 24-hour markets. Dumb question: why don't they standardize on UTC?
The U.S. and other large countries are so large that they spread across several time zones, so people who are used to communicate from the West coast to the East coast are aware that they need to take the time zone into account when they compare times. However, each European country is located in a single time zone, so lots of people are not even aware that there are different time zones. Only if they take a flight for holidays etc. they are wondering why times differ. ;-) So from my experience even many software didn't have in mind that they have to take care of time zones when they initially wrote e.g. some billing software which was only used in their own country, so when they suddenly have to think globally, e.g. compare data recoreded in countries belonging to different time zones, the are totally surprised. We have even some customers that requested for NTP server solutions where NTP sends local time, including DST changes, instead of UTC. We always have to explain to them why this is a very bad idea, but there are even some 3rd party client devices out there (especially in power industries) which really expect this. :-( Martin -- Martin Burnicki Senior Software Engineer MEINBERG Funkuhren GmbH & Co. KG Email: martin.burnicki@meinberg.de Phone: +49 (0)5281 9309-14 Fax: +49 (0)5281 9309-30 Lange Wand 9, 31812 Bad Pyrmont, Germany Amtsgericht Hannover 17HRA 100322 Geschäftsführer/Managing Directors: Günter Meinberg, Werner Meinberg, Andre Hartmann, Heiko Gerstung Web: http://www.meinberg.de
participants (3)
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Martin Burnicki -
Paul Eggert -
Steffen Nurpmeso