One should also note that the segmentation of different types of reserves may differ from country to country with a greater or lesser role of market pricing. In general, however, the trend is towards an ever closer integration of market and network operations as witnessed by the creation of hourly intraday trading on Europe’s EPEX SPOT platform, which begins to blur the line between the provision of electric load to customers and network stabilisation services. Such plants have the advantage of great flexibility but the disadvantage of low-thermal efficiency and high marginal costs. In the absence of any intermittency issues, they are thus only used during extreme peak times.