​Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR) is the first line of defence for European grid frequency, and the closest thing European balancing has to a single market. Nine countries buy it together in one daily auction, at one shared price if there are no import or export limits in the way. It is a symmetric capacity product: the auction pays for capacity held on standby in each direction, and how much frequency actually needs correcting during delivery doesn't change what a capacity block earns. For a full primer on the mechanics, read FCR explained: why it matters for batteries.

In 2026 so far, all nine countries have cleared at the common cross-border price in only 29% of auction blocks; in 2024 it was 0.4%. The Netherlands has paid 21% above the cross-border price this year, and France has cleared 11% below it. Only Germany and France hold more capacity than they need.

A country that clears below the cross-border price has local supply stuck behind an export limit. A country that clears above it has local supply that has not caught up with demand. Ko reads all FCR datasets and combines them so you don’t have to.

Ko can query FCR history from January 2020

• Capacity auction results: daily settlement capacity prices for each of the nine countries in the FCR Cooperation plus the shared cross-border price, with demand and deficit/surplus volumes per country, January 2020 to present. One daily product until 30 June 2020, six 4-hour blocks since 1 July 2020.
• Capacity auction demand: tendered demand, export limits, and core portions per country and per German TSO control area, with gate opening and closure times, January 2020 to present.
• Capacity auction bids: the full anonymised order book, one row per bid, with the offered price, the volume offered and the volume awarded, and the country the bid was submitted in, January 2020 to present. This is the dataset that makes an export limit or a core share visible bid by bid.

One product, one auction, and nine prices when the limits bind

FCR stabilises grid frequency within seconds of a deviation: response must begin at ±0.01 Hz, and full committed power must arrive within 30 seconds and be sustainable for 15 minutes. The product is symmetric. One bid commits capacity to regulate in both directions, so the scarcer direction sets the price of the whole block.

Activation is settled separately. The energy a unit delivers when frequency moves flows through its balancing group and is charged at the imbalance price, so the FCR product carries no energy payment of its own. That exposure can run either way: a study of a 6 MW German battery covering July 2018 to June 2021 found imbalance settlement added €3.6-12.8k per MW of FCR per year rather than costing anything.

Procurement runs through a single daily auction at regelleistung.net, one day ahead of delivery, in six 4-hour blocks. Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, western Denmark (DK1), France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Switzerland tender jointly: around 1,700 MW on average in 2026, with Germany (584 MW) and France (610 MW) making up 70% of it. The auction settles pay-as-cleared: every winning bid in a block earns the marginal price.

Each country carries an export limit: the maximum capacity it may sell to the rest of the cooperation, and a core share: the minimum it must source from units inside its own borders. When cheap supply exceeds local demand plus the export limit, the surplus cannot leave, and the local price separates below the shared price. When a core share forces a country to buy expensive local capacity it could otherwise have imported, its price separates above. Germany and western Denmark form one block behind a shared 183 MW export limit, which is why their prices have been identical in every auction since 2023.

Both limits are visible in the auction's own order book, which regelleistung.net publishes bid by bid. On 26 January 2026, the 12:00-16:00 block cleared 1,704 MW from 333 bids at a cross-border price of €9.60/MW/h. France was awarded exactly 793 MW, its 610 MW demand plus its 183 MW export limit, and settled at €2.90/MW/h. The Netherlands was awarded exactly its 41 MW core share, and filling it took four Dutch bids priced above the cross-border price, the last at €77.14/MW/h.

Prices are published in €/MW per 4-hour block, meaning they need to be divided by four to get to normalised €/MW/h prices. Every price in this article is quoted in €/MW/h. Auctions before 1 July 2020 procured a single daily product, where one price covered the whole day, so unconverted early prices look far higher.

The Capacity auction results dataset carries a second tender round on 60 delivery days since 2020, and those rows do not line up with the main round (tender 1): about half carry no country price at all. On 29 October 2025 the Netherlands cleared at €8,345.50/MW/h in the first round and €239-472/MW/h in the second.

The market grew in steps, and the data carries the joins

The cooperation took eleven years to reach its current nine members, counting from the first joint German-Swiss tender in March 2012, and each country's price series starts at its accession. Czech prices begin on 1 March 2023, so any cooperation-wide average before that date is an average of eight countries or fewer.

How to analyse FCR Cooperation data with Ko

The examples below are real Ko sessions, run in July 2026. Each prompt was asked in the live product; Ko generated the SQL, queried the data, built its own chart, and wrote the interpretation. Each section condenses Ko's actual answer, and the embedded charts are built from the same underlying data.

Click any prompt to open it in the product and ask it yourself. Results will reflect the latest available data.

Try asking Ko: plot the monthly average German and cross-border FCR capacity prices since January 2024 as a line chart

The cross-border price has run above Germany's through most of 2026, implying committed German capacity beyond what the bidding zone and its export limit can absorb. The gap is small but new: before 2026 the two series were near-identical, with winter troughs (around €6.70/MW/h in December 2025) and spring surges in both years.

Monthly average gaps run from €0.26/MW/h in March 2026 to €1.98/MW/h in July. The monthly average hides what the blocks do: Germany cleared below the cross-border price in 21% of the 1,206 blocks between January and 20 July 2026, and in 68% of overnight 00:00-04:00 blocks, at an average discount of €5.58/MW/h in the blocks where it clears below. In no year from 2020 to 2025 did that share exceed 4%. The premium daytime blocks barely diverge at all.

German battery supply, already larger than German FCR demand, saturates the 584 MW requirement plus the 183 MW export limit in the hours when batteries have least else to do, and the surplus decouples the overnight price downward. This is an early sign of battery buildout compressing FCR prices, and it appears in the German national price before the cross-border price because Germany's own requirement plus its export limit is a tighter ceiling than the cooperation's total demand. The result is congestion pricing applied to frequency response.

Try asking Ko: plot the monthly average French and cross-border FCR capacity prices since January 2023 as a line chart