National Energy Company Ukrenergo has presented the Market Management System platform for two new segments of the wholesale electricity market (the balancing market and the ancillary service market), which has been functioning in the test mode since December 2018.

"Now we are trying to organize the schedule of our work in such a way as to create minimally sufficient functionality for launching a new market on July 1," Ukrenergo CEO Vsevolod Kovalchuk said at the presentation on Tuesday.

He recalled that the platform developers intend to suspend work due to slippage in the payment schedule: the Energy and Coal Industry Ministry stopped agreeing on payments after the reassignment of Ukrenergo to the Finance Ministry.

Kovalchuk expressed hope that the problem will be resolved in March. To this end, the Finance Ministry and the Justice Ministry will prepare draft amendments to a resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers and the contract of Ukrenergo with a consortium of contractors. Approval of the changes will allow transferring the payment approval functions of Ukrenergo from the Energy and Coal Ministry to the Finance Ministry, which will unblock the payment process for software being developed for the new wholesale electricity market, the head of the transmission system operator said.

Currently, the Market Management System platform operates in test mode. The players of the energy market – producers, electricity suppliers and distribution system operators – are being registered. Data on consumption and transmission of energy is collected for the development of mathematical models that will allow forecasting misbalances in the market of electricity (the difference between predicted and actual consumption).

According to Ukrenergo, today the level of filling the platform with data is insufficient, so the indicators in it are not relevant.