The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) has passed a suo motu order titled CERC (Power Market) (Revised Trading and Contract Design) Order, 2025, under the CERC (Power Market) Regulations, 2021, to standardise short-term electricity contracts and improve efficiency in power trading across exchanges.
In the day ahead contingency segment, exchanges must now use a uniform price step auction mechanism instead of continuous matching, enhancing transparency and preventing price manipulation. For the term ahead market (TAM), all custom and overlapping time slots, including those under Green TAM and High Price TAM, are to be discontinued, with exchanges reverting to standard hourly blocks to consolidate liquidity. Further, in assured delivery based contracts, requisitions must follow defined bidding and acceptance windows with a clear separation between bidding and execution stages. Duplicate bids across exchanges will no longer be permitted. The exchanges have also been directed to immediately discontinue all “dynamic” intra-day and DAC contracts, which CERC found to be non-standard and liquidity-fragmenting. In addition, all power exchanges are now required to publish both the number and volume of buy and sell bids for TAM and contingency contracts on their websites, not just the traded volumes.