Non-genuine orders, bids and balancing data under REMIT
An order or bid the participant does not want executed tells the market something false about supply or demand. The balancing decisions show it most clearly: a bid at an extreme price to avoid activation, or capacity sold that was not there.
On this page
The definition
ACER lists placing orders with no intention of executing them: issuing orders without an interest in their individual execution, whether withdrawn before execution or even executed, which are likely to give misleading signals about supply, demand or price or to secure an artificial price.
“Placing orders with no intention of executing them: issuing order(s) to trade, without an interest in their individual execution (the orders may be withdrawn before the execution or even executed), which are likely to give misleading signals as to the supply of or demand or price for wholesale energy products or likely to secure the price at an artificial level.”
The decisions
Futugrid bid 1 MW of balancing energy at -9,999 EUR/MWh to avoid activation while it updated software; the bid was activated and set the marginal price. Boliden Odda sold reserve capacity it could not provide because of maintenance, then raised its regulating power bid to avoid activation. During the German system imbalances of June 2019, Energi Danmark and Optimax offered intraday power they did not have and did not intend to procure.
In Great Britain the same signal travels through technical data rather than orders. Ofgem found that InterGen deliberately told National Grid that power stations would not run over the evening peak, and that EDF Energy Thermal Generation and ESB/Carrington inflated their plants' stable export limits, so the system operator bought more power than it needed. Ofgem held that inaccurate dynamic parameters submitted in the Balancing Mechanism can breach Article 5.
In gas, Uniper's traders used an iceberg order to block other participants from trading with the balancing buyer on PEGAS, and CoRDiS held that Danske Commodities' first-round capacity bookings at the France-Spain interconnection point were not genuine.
What can explain it innocently
A bid that does not clear is not non-genuine for that reason: most bids do not clear. The question is whether the participant would have been willing to be executed at the price it entered. Operational constraints are real, but REMIT's answer to them is disclosure and the market's own procedures for unavailability, not a price chosen to make execution impossible.
Decisions
- Futugrid fined for a non-genuine balancing bid (Estonia, 2026)Estonia · Published 9 October 2026 · Electricity
- Danske Commodities and Equinor fined EUR 12 million (CRE, 2025)France · Decided 20 January 2025 · Gas
- Boliden Odda fined NOK 5 million over a reserve it could not deliverNorway · Published 10 November 2023 · Electricity
- Energi Danmark and Optimax fined over the June 2019 imbalancesGermany · Published 5 October 2021 · Electricity
- ESB and Carrington pay GBP 6 million over inflated balancing dataGreat Britain · Published 24 August 2021 · Electricity
- EDF Energy Thermal Generation pays GBP 6 million over balancing dataGreat Britain · Published 16 December 2020 · Electricity
- InterGen to pay GBP 37 million for misleading National Grid (Ofgem)Great Britain · Published 15 April 2020 · Electricity
- Uniper and two traders fined for blocking a gas order book (2019)Germany · Published 20 February 2019 · Gas
Sources
Sources read on 15 October 2026. This guide summarises the regulation and ACER’s non-binding guidance for orientation; it is not legal advice, and the decisions it cites are the deciding authorities’ findings, some of them under appeal.