UPDATE 1-Too little baseload power in south Germany-regulator

* Industry-heavy south potentially short of power

* Transmission networks not up to long-distance transport

* Austrians warn against creating price zones (Adds comments from Austrian supplier EAA)

FRANKFURT, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Germany's power grid regulator said on Monday a power supply crisis two weeks ago was over but pointed to potential shortfalls in round-the-clock power capacity in southern Germany.

The country switched off 40 percent of its nuclear capacity a year ago in the wake of Japan's Fukushima disaster, prompting questions about how well the system would perform during times of high demand such as a recent cold snap across Europe.

"One big job is baseload power which will be missing especially in the south of Germany," Matthias Kurth, head of the federal grid agency (BnetzA), said in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"I can only advise all stakeholders to use the experiences of this winter to get together and clarify the framework for new plant construction plans in a reliable fashion."

Kurth said new coal-to-power plants under construction in Mannheim and Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany would not be sufficient to avert future supply gap problems.

His agency last autumn designated German and Austrian power plants to ensure there was reserve capacity on standby to help Germany at times of high demand and little supply.

A crisis scenario during the cold snap of the week started Feb. 6 was resolved with the help of reserves, but the authority subsequently said it would investigate trading behaviour that pushed the market to the brink of collapse.

It said that there had been inexplicable forecast errors by suppliers that made it necessary to resort to reserves.

Big players such as E.ON and RWE said the criticism was too general. There are a few thousand energy traders.

Transmission grid operators which have to ensure balanced loads on the networks have said that at times during the crisis, thousands of megawatts (MW) of secure capacity had been missing and there would not have been a safety margin had there been an additional unscheduled plant breakdown.

Southern Germany is home to big manufacturers which need constant energy supply, while closure of regional nuclear reactors such as Neckarwestheim 1, Isar 1 and Philippsburg 1 has left the area vulnerable to power supply disruptions.

During the recent cold snap, there were added problems with less Russian gas supply to gas-fired power stations and lower-than-usual wind power, especially in the landlocked south.

One idea that has been considered to fix an imbalance in wind power supply from future offshore generation on the North Sea is to create different prices zones in the north and south.

It has been criticised by EnergieAllianz Austria (EAA), a central European distributor selling to 33,000 power and gas customer accounts in Germany.

Germany and Austria removed power bottlenecks in the middle of the last decade and have no border power auctions.

"Creating price zones and splitting into several market sectors would be a setback for cross-border trade and in the long term would raise prices," said EAA managing director Christian Wojta. (Reporting by Vera Eckert, editing by Jason Neely)