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Control areas and balancing groups

Germany’s transmission grid is divided into four TSO control areas (Regelzonen): n:lead operates one balancing group (Bilanzkreis) per control area for the customer. A balancing group is a virtual energy account with its TSO: all physical in-feeds/out-takes and all commercial schedules of the portfolio in that area are booked into it.
A balancing group must net to zero for every quarter-hour. Residual imbalances are settled at the imbalance price (Ausgleichsenergie) — the entire purpose of this service is to nominate schedules that avoid that.

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What a schedule contains

A balancing-group schedule consists of:
  • the production forecast of the portfolio in that area (in-feed),
  • the consumption forecast (off-take),
  • all trades with counterparties: the EPEX/ECC exchange delivery (home group only) and the cross-control-area transfers between our own groups.
Trades are aggregated per direction and counterparty: for each counterparty there is at most one incoming and one outgoing series, values are non-negative, and a negative flow simply appears in the opposite direction. A correct schedule sums to zero at every interval:
The physical side (load, generation) is allocated into the balancing group by the DSOs/TSO based on metering — the BRP does not nominate it; the forecasts in the schedule are the BRP’s declared expectation of it. n:lead computes these quantities from your data and submits the resulting schedules to the TSOs.

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Quarter-hours and daylight saving

Everything is quarter-hourly in Europe/Berlin, local midnight to midnight: The service computes the expected count from the timezone database and rejects forecasts with any other length — a 96-value forecast for a DST day is a validation error, not something to silently pad.

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One bidding zone, one home area

Germany is a single day-ahead bidding zone: the EPEX day-ahead trade is one volume for the whole German position. Physical delivery (via ECC, the exchange’s clearing house) lands in one balancing group — the home balancing group, in a home control area agreed as part of your setup. That creates the central distribution problem this service solves: the other three balancing groups never see the exchange delivery directly, so the home group must pass their share on via matched cross-control-area transfer pairs (out of home / into target). How the quantities are derived is on the Core Algorithm page.

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Sign conventions