The Spanish Supreme Court rules that isolated conduct in the daily energy market constitutes a continuous abuse of dominance (Iberdola Generación)

I. The Spanish generation market As has been described in previous bulletin articles [1] the Spanish generation market is extremely complex and heavily intervened by burdensome regulation. In a nutshell, tenders (pools) are organised every hour of the day by a public entity in order to fulfil the expected electricity needs of a defined area. In these pools, electricity producers offer a given amount of electricity (a “package”) at different prices; i.e. every producer is entitled to offer several packages at different prices. Afterwards the authority couples the bids with the final price to be paid being that of the last price accepted for the pool each hour. This first stage is known as the daily market. The packages that have been offered at a higher price remain unsold.