Energy balance management systems for distribution companies

The "Associations\´ Agreement on Criteria to Determine Use of System Charges for Electric Energy" is the underlying concept for imbalance settlement and network use charges in Germany\´s electricity market. It introduces a concept of balance groups to assign these costs to market participants. In order to take small customers\´ load behavior into consideration, simplified methods with synthetic or analytic load profile processing are defined. This paper discusses this general framework and derives the requirements for a computer-based tool to support distribution companies. An example from real life based on a data warehouse concept and a modern three-tier architecture is presented