In the last months of 2026, the number of venues through which a market participant can reach the Norwegian side of the North Sea Link interconnector is set to change. For a trader, this is good news; more venues mean more pricing surface, more flexibility in how exposure is constructed, and a degree of competitive pressure on fees.
A trading desk that has, until now, treated NSL as a single workflow will however find that the workflow they are used to no longer holds. Trade results, schedules and position data may need to be consumed from more than one Power Exchange for the same delivery hour.
Nominations, where applicable, will need to be assembled from those parallel inputs and reflected correctly in downstream scheduling processes before the relevant gate closes. Any imbalance or reconciliation issue will need to be traceable back to the originating venue, product and delivery period. The audit trail, which today may run through one set of confirmations, will tomorrow need to account for several.
Schedulers across the European mainland have been operating in multi-exchange environments for years. What is novel in this case is that NSL has, until now, been the easy case: one cable, one exchange, one workflow. The September / Q4 (the exact date is yet to be formally announced but it has been indicated to be at around this time) change removes that simplicity, on a deadline.
There are, as a result, a small number of questions worth putting to whichever team currently owns NSL operations:
- Can your existing system ingest capacity allocations from more than one source for the same interconnector?
- Can nominations can be assembled from parallel inputs without manual reconciliation?
- Will the audit trail will hold up to a regulator’s enquiry about a flow routed through Exchange B rather
than Exchange A?
If this all sounds a bit more complicated than you’d like it to be, then speak to us about PowerDesk Scheduler.
For PowerDesk Scheduler clients, getting ready for the changeover needs no system preparation at all, we handle it all on our side and they just keep flowing power as they normally would. If this sounds like a better solution, get in touch with us today and see how we can help.
