Energy balance management systems for distribution companies

The "Associations' Agreement on Criteria to Determine Use of System Charges for Electric Energy" is the underlying concept for imbalance settlement and network use charges in Germany's electricity market. It introduces a concept of balance groups to assign these costs to market participants. In order to take small customers' load behavior into consideration, simplified methods with synthetic or analytic load profile processing are defined. This paper discusses this general framework and derives the requirements for a computer-based tool to support distribution companies. An example from real life based on a data warehouse concept and a modern three-tier architecture is presented.