Svk Elastisk Efterfrågan mFRR (2026)

Summary

From 22 June 2026, Svenska kraftnät introduced elastisk efterfrågan (elastic demand) for Sweden’s mFRR balancing-energy need in the Nordic budväljare (bid selector). Elastic demand lets the bid selector decline to activate part of the total need when the price is judged too high, which is expected to dampen prices. It replaces the toleransband (tolerance band) in the Nordic bid selector. This is a direct response to the recurring extreme/illogical imbalance prices that have followed the digitalised Nordic balancing solution.

What changed

• Elastic demand: the bid selector may leave a portion of the mFRR need un-activated if the offered price is too high. The elastic volume is capped at 70 MW per quarter-hour (15-min ISP) for operational-security reasons; any imbalance not covered by mFRR is instead covered by other ancillary services, such as aFRR.
• Toleransband removed: the tolerance band made the bid selector’s optimisation far more complex, lengthening computation time so the algorithm could not always reach an optimal solution within the time limit — the recurring cause of illogical bid selections and mispricing. Elastic demand replaces it in the Nordic bid selector; Svk’s local bid selector is unchanged for now.
• Stated purpose: reduce the number of extreme-imbalance-price events; use procured balancing reserves more efficiently; handle more variation and a more integrated Nordic/European market.

Nordic coordination and MARI

• The design was coordinated Nordically. Denmark (Energinet) and Norway (Statnett) have already implemented elastic demand for mFRR balancing energy; Finland (Fingrid) plans to introduce it later.
• Elastic demand is designed to remain usable on connection to the European MARI platform (source does not give a MARI connection date; see Balancing Markets › PICASSO and MARI — European platform connections for the current timeline).

Key claims and observations

1. A market-design fix for the post-2025 imbalance-price volatility. The wiki attributes volatile/extreme obalanspriser to the March 2025 Nordic mFRR EAM + 15-min ISP transition; elastic demand (plus toleransband removal) is the operator’s structural mitigation, ahead of the separately-planned revised obalanspris (≥ March 2027).
2. A demand-side price cap by another name. Allowing the buyer (TSO) to walk away above a price introduces a willingness-to-pay ceiling into balancing-energy clearing — conceptually similar to the elastic/price-responsive demand the wider market keeps trying to surface.
3. 70 MW/quarter is a deliberately conservative cap, with aFRR as the backstop for any uncovered imbalance — so this is a price-efficiency measure, not a reliability relaxation.
4. Algorithmic root cause is explicit: the toleransband’s optimisation complexity was breaking the bid selector’s time budget. A rare public admission that the clearing algorithm itself was producing the bad prices.

Relevance to wiki topics