There are significant changes foreseen to the Nordic synchronous system in the next decade, such as, the:

• closure of thermal power plants, including nuclear plant,
• tripling the installed wind capacity to some 25 GW,
• the increase of the interconnector capacity to non-Nordic countries by 50%, changing requirements from the new Guideline on Electricity Balancing as well as the EU “winter package”.

The main objective of the project was to review the current system balancing mechanism and to prepare modifications to the pricing methodology for imbalances.

In order to achieve the above mentioned goal, E-Bridge worked closely together with representations of the four Nordic Transmission System Operators (TSOs). E-Bridge prepared discussion documents on major design options and discussed those with the Nordic TSOs in a number of full-day workshops during the course of the project.

The study focussed on aFRR (automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve), mFRR (Manual Frequency Restoration Reserve) and RR (Restoration Reserve). Part of this reserve may also be used for congestion management. Frequency containment reserve is a continuous capacity product used for balancing. It was considered outside the scope of this project as its activation is mainly driven by technical parameters rather than by a differentiation of energy prices.

The outcome of the study is a comprehensive document, suggesting amendments and modifications of the ten most important design options, such as capacity procurement, regulating power pricing of concentrated reserves, imbalance price setting and the co-optimization of different reserve products. The project group takes these recommendations as input into the on-going discussion on the development of the system balancing scheme and the discussion of the creation of a single European platform for balancing, as required by the European Commission in the “Clean Energy Package”.