Comfort bids allow you to place a bid for future auctions or bidding rounds without being online during the actual bidding time. It can ease the bidding process quite a lot for you, as you do not have to be online for each bidding round. This is especially useful for long-term auctions with many bidding rounds on several days.
Can I skip a bidding round using only comfort bids?
Yes, it is possible to not specify price steps in your bidding curve for each price step in the auction. By entering a surcharge value in a bid price step which is higher than the next auction price step(s), your settings for the lower bid price step are used to bid in all auction rounds until the auction price reaches your higher bid price step.
In this example, the large price step is 25 groszy and the small one 5 groszy each for the auction. The bidding curve is applied as follows:
- For auction rounds where the surcharge is less than 50 groszy, a bid is automatically placed for 50,000 kWh/h.
- When the auction surcharge is between 50 groszy and 100 groszy, a bid is automatically placed for 25,000kWh/h.
What happens if I specify a price step that will not exist in the auction?
While placing your comfort bid, you can specify the capacity amount for any surcharge value. In other words, the platform lets you enter prices, that will never be exactly reached by the bidding algorithm.
The platform will automatically bid your specified capacity for each round until the auction surcharge value is higher than your highest specified bid surcharge value. This means that if your specified highest bid price step surcharge value is not equal to any auction price step surcharge value, then the platform will place bids until the auction surcharge value is higher than the highest bid surcharge value you specified.
If you are allocated capacity, then you will only need to pay the price of the surcharge in the final bidding round and not the surcharge you specified.
e.g.:
As you can see in the picture below, the bids placed are not equal to the predefined price steps of 25 groszy per large price step or 5 groszy per small price step.
By specifying with a surcharge of 30 groszy the algorithm will automatically place a bid of 50,00kWh/h at 0 surcharge, 37,500kwh/h at a surcharge of 25 and 30 groszy, and a bid on 25,000kwh/h at a surcharge of 35, 40, 45, 50 and 55 groszy, depending on the total bidding behaviour of all participating shippers and the outcome of each bidding round following the ascending-clock algorithm. No bid will be placed when the auction surcharge reaches 60 groszy or higher.
After an oversell occurs in the first two bidding rounds, the comfort function automatically places a bid with a surcharge of 50 groszy for 25,000kwh/h which is the second large price step in this auction.
How to place a bid with two different balancing group
In order to do that, the auction need to be in the running period, it is not possible via comfort bid.
The shipper need to place at least two different bids with different balancing group.
Some suggestions when thinking about long-term comfort bids
Your bid quantity
- The maximum amount of capacity you can request for any price step is the marketable capacity defined by the TSO
- Long-term auctions are working with the ascending-clock-algorithm, therefor several bidding rounds might be applied
- Your future bids must be volume-wise either the same or less than in the round before with a lower price
- The surcharge you enter for following rounds must be the same or higher than in the rounds before
- You can find more information about ascending-clock algorithms and suggestions here.
- Your comfort bid in long-term auctions can be corrected or changed and you are still able to place bids for the regarding auction manually
- The platform works with British decimal system
- So, you would enter 1,234.56 instead of writing 1.234,56
Assignment
- You can only bid on auctions from TSOs who have approved you
Active bid and comfort bid
- If a current bidding round is running, you cannot change the comfort bid for this round.
- However, you can change your automatically-placed bid for the current round manually.
- The comfort bid can be updated after the round has finished and before the next round begins.
Credit limit
- The platform does not check your available credit limit before accepting your comfort bid settings. However, it will not place the auction bid in the running round if there is not enough credit limit available.
- Make sure you have enough credit limit before you enter a comfort bid.
Notification
- Whenever a bid is automatically placed for you based on your comfort bid settings, you will receive an E-Mail with the details of the bid.