The construction of the European electricity market goes through a phase of regional consolidation. Seven regions have been set up.

This is how a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed on 6 June 2007 by the German, Belgian, French, Luxembourg and Dutch governments and the concerned actors (TSOs, power exchanges, regulators, market players) to support the regional Central Western Europe initiative.

The MoU includes provision for the development of market mechanisms, notably extending market coupling arrangements to the entire zone, using a new method based on physical electricity flows (flow based market coupling).

In this framework, the Transmission System Operators have decided to launch a common project, to design and set up a technical coordinated process related to this market coupling. ATC based and Flow-Based projects are parts of the implementation, that should lead to the regional market coupling in 2010 (first ATC-based).

The technical data needed are based on CWE-wide files called D2CF, which are the results of single (corresponding to one TSO) D2CF files merged together. CORESO takes a major place in this process by providing the merging service.

For the last months, CORESO has strengthened its experience in merging activities by performing them every day on DACF files, in frame of its day-ahead process. Therefore, it naturally proposed this service to D-2 experimentation group, and was chosen among other initiatives.

Each day, CORESO gathers files representing the best two-days forecast of each TSO (namely Amprion, ELIA, EnBW, Transpower, RTE, TenneT and 50Hertz), and merges them before making results available for the different actors.

As the overall D-2 process is at an experimentation step, CORESO has also become the preferred partner concerning merging activity feedback: data gathering and analysing about whole process performance, participation in feedback meetings, etc.

Through this project, CORESO becomes one of the main players in regional grid security assessment in the context of the Central Western Europe initiative, and actively participates to the fluidisation of cross-border power exchanges