From now on, the Netherlands and its neighbors balance their grids together

From now on, the Netherlands together with Germany, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and the Czech Republic will allow the transmission system operators in these countries to share each other’s instantaneous shortages and surpluses of electricity. As a result, fewer measures need to be taken in each individual country to balance their grids, because other countries can now also help. This so-called grid balancing consists of specific measures such as raising or reducing the production of electricity of plants or the electricity consumption of industry. With this new system, less dispatch is needed because the directly available surpluses in other countries are used first before we come into action in our own country.

EUR 7 million

“This collaboration is expected to generate a saving of approximately EUR 7 million per year for the Netherlands. The participating countries will compensate each other for each country’s contribution. In the Netherlands, that contribution will be settled with the transmission tariffs for consumers and businesses,” says Henk Don, Member of the Board of the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM). ACM has approved the collaborative proposal that had been submitted by Dutch transmission system operator TenneT. With this approval, TenneT’s successful pilot project has been completed. In the Netherlands, TenneT is the transmission system operator that balances our grid. It incentivises the market participants with the lowest costs to balance the system.

Security of supply

As these participating countries have now agreed to balance their grids together, the likelihood of blackouts on our grid has decreased even further. Continuously balancing supply and demand is a key aspect of the security of electricity supply, which prevents that, for example, a large part of Europe suffers a continent-wide blackout. With this decision, another step is taken towards a single European energy market.