Swissgrid promotes competition in the electricity market. It has paved the way for a wider group of providers to participate in the control energy market. Control energy is required to balance the difference between electricity generation and consumption. The greater liquidity on the control energy market has reduced Swissgrid’s procurement costs. Expanding the control energy market has created international platforms for providers and also enabled smaller-scale energy producers and consumers to bundle and offer their capacities by means of control pooling.
Control energy and energy consumption
This chart shows the development of control energy consumed and released in relation to the energy effectively consumed in Switzerland. Requests for control power are relatively small compared to total consumption, and amount to a single-digit percentage. This shows that the balance groups which supply end consumers in Switzerland achieve a high degree of forecast accuracy. Incentives are created by corresponding pricing of the balance energy to continually improve the behaviour of the balance groups responsible parties.