From July 1, 2007, the company’s power generation arm will use a special website to post information on unplanned outages for each power plant unit within an hour of their occurrence.
The company said that, as a result, all market players will have round-the-clock access to information about outages and production slumps of a total of 100MW or more. RWE Power will also publish an estimate of how long the outage could last.
The company’s RWE Transportnetz Strom subsidiary is also going to improve the quality of the information available about the distribution network, by providing details of wind power input, control area balance, frequency and aggregate power generation for each control area. A date for this service has not yet been revealed.
An additional part of the transparency drive is due to commence in January 2008, when the grid input of every RWE power plant with an output of more than 100MW will be published in real-time on the internet. Information about how generation capacity is being used will provide market players with indicators on the current supply situation, the utility commented.
Ulrich Jobs, RWE Power’s CEO, said that he hopes that both German and European politicians will support the transparency program. He called upon the European Commission to set such transparency criteria as a Europe-wide standard, as he believes it will facilitate fair competition within the EU energy market.
