2026-07-17Updated 2026-08-15Regulation

A parameter, not a participant

Inside the machine that computes what Europe may trade, outside the market it clears. Switzerland after seventeen years at a door it never walked through.

By Matthias Blank

Key takeaways

A JAO notice of 24 July 2020 states both halves of Switzerland’s position: its grid models are fed into the CWE capacity calculation "to increase the quality of the calculation", yet "Swissgrid is not able to participate in the CWE FB MC". A parameter, not a participant.
Switzerland was never excluded from market coupling. It was never admitted. Negotiations opened in 2007; the last round was 2018; the file froze when the EU tied electricity to an institutional agreement. Swissgrid counts seventeen years.
Swissgrid redispatch energy rose from 17,180 MWh in 2014 to 552,069 MWh in 2024, 32× in a decade, and Swissgrid names the cause as Switzerland’s inadequate integration into European processes. The energy spent is hydro: paid in water, not money.
In the BFE’s own 2021 modelling, the "no cooperation" scenario is the cheapest to redispatch (€282m vs €809m) and the least secure: 47 hours of lost load, critical at the end of March. Only the electricity agreement is both cheap and secure. The agreement, signed 2 March 2026, is years from ratification.

Two Sentences in One Notice

On 24 July 2020 the Joint Allocation Office (JAO, the company the European transmission system operators own between them to run their cross-border capacity auctions) published a market notice under a title dry enough to pass for a filing error: "[CWE Flow-Based Market Coupling] Usage Swiss D2CF models". It took effect on 3 August 2020. Two sentences in it describe Switzerland's place in the European power system more precisely than anything said about it from a podium since.

The first: *"Swissgrid agreed to provide its available D2CF (two days ahead) models to the CWE system in order to increase the quality of the calculation."*

The second: *"Due to absence of an intergovernmental agreement between Switzerland and the EU, Swissgrid is not able to participate in the CWE FB MC."*

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.

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