* Traders want change to Polish energy law
* They say measure restricts liquidity
* Difficulty can arise in gaining license
By Michael Kahn
PRAGUE, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Poland's new energy law is
saddling foreign utilities with higher costs and making it more
difficult for them to trade, a situation that threatens to crimp
development of the Polish power market, utility traders say.
The measure, which took effect in August, calls for
companies to trade at least 15 percent of the power they
generate either on Poland's POLPX bourse or other public trading
platforms.
The law also requires each generation plant to have a
licensed broker on site as part of the effort to increase the
transparency of Poland's electricity market and boost liquidity.
But traders at utilities say the measure instead has made it
difficult for them to access the market and forced them to use
local brokerages that can be up to 10 times more expensive than
traditional over-the-counter brokers.
"We would like to express our opinion that the legal
requirements for trading on the Polish power exchanges are
unjustifiably excessive and complicated," the European
Federation of Energy Traders said in a letter to Polish
officials obtained by Reuters.
"We hope these strict legal conditions will change soon."
CEZ's <> head of trading, Michal Skalka, and others
say one problem stems from the fact that licenses to trade on
the bourse are granted to individuals, not companies.
Because CEZ's licensed trader recently left the company,
central Europe's biggest utility cannot trade directly on the
Polish bourse until a replacement can take the exam, which is
not offered until March, Skalka told Reuters.
NOT ABLE TO BE MARKET MAKER
"As it is now, it is not going to help market liquidity,
because traders cannot act through current mandatory broker
houses directly and swiftly on POLPX in real time, and it does
not make sense to have (your) own licensed trader for each
individual power station," he said.
"We want to be a market maker in Poland, but we simply won't
be able to do that. We won't be able to develop the Polish
market to help develop liquidity."
POLPX chief Gregorz Onichimowski said while he agreed with
proposals to further liberalise markets, he believes there are
plenty of people who meet the trading requirements for big
companies to hire.
"We would prefer the requirements to be set by the exchanges
themselves, so anyone who has experience from EPEX spot, APX or
other exchanges could trade on our market," he told Reuters.
"On the other hand I would not panic, there is a group of
people on the market who meet the needed requirements, and
surely the big companies can find someone to hire."
Traders see the region as a potentially lucrative one in
part due to good grid connections and scope for prices to rise
but want to see increased transparency and faster market
liberalisation.
POLPX competes with the Prague-based Power Exchange Central
Europe and Hungary's HUPX, which are also pushing to boost
volumes and become the centre of a regional trading hub.
Frank Brannvoll, head of illiquid markets at GDF Suez
<GSZ.PA>, said the restrictions at POLPX severely punish outside
companies, because the exams to gain a license are so infrequent
and only in Polish.
"This severely punishes outside Poland companies as it is
difficult to take the examination and favours a few hundred
people, especially as POLPX is now mandatory," Brannvoll said.
(Additional reporting by Patryk Wasilewski, Editing by Jane
Baird)
