Balancing

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.

Control energy requests

Actual electricity consumption and production can vary from the forecast, or there can be unexpected power plant or consumer outages. In such cases, either positive or negative control power is used to keep the frequency stable at 50 Hertz. This chart shows the maximum deviation in each month. In the secondary control, it reaches peaks of up to 400 megawatts, about the power of a large hydroelectric power plant or consumer.

The chart shows the availability of all the power plants that are prequalified to provide the control power. Also included are plants which are not prequalified but which have an installed power output of more than 50 MW and also feed directly into the transmission grid.

The power plant operators are obliged to provide Swissgrid with the following information for each power plant.

• operational planning for the generating units,
• restrictions in operational management of the generating units, and
• available generating capacity (active and reactive power).

The chart includes the production data of 93 % of the power plants in Switzerland.