The regular annoyance here is that in these cases, natural gas suppliers sometimes incur considerable costs for the delivery or purchase of the excess or shortfall in consumption, costs that have hardly been calculable in advance so far. And this "balancing energy" cost risk recently rose again significantly in the natural gas market.
MET Germany from now provides a remedy with the most innovative offer on the market to date. In recent months, the company has been able to draw on the many years of experience of its employees and, in particular, on the expertise and innovative strength of the entire MET Group for its development. As part of the Swiss-based MET Group, one of Europe's leading energy companies with subsidiaries in 14 European countries, MET Germany can benefit from the combined expertise of an international network - for the benefit of its customers.
The concrete result: via a balancing group pool, MET Germany customers will be able to significantly reduce their costs for balancing energy in the future. Several balancing groups are connected with each other and the over- or under-supply of individual balancing groups is balanced out. MET Germany guarantees the participants in the pool that they have full transparency anytime about the concrete contribution they make statistically to balancing the pool.
The requirements for the new product: easy handling and noticeable cost and risk reduction for the customers
"When developing the new product, we had several things clearly in mind: The product must be simple, easy for the pool participants to handle, and enable them to achieve real economic added value in the form of reduced risks and, above all, lower costs for balancing energy," emphasises Jörg Selbach-Röntgen, Managing Director of MET Germany.
The premium is calculated individually for each pool participant. The result is not only that good forecast quality is rewarded, but also that the forecast errors in the pool compensate mutually for each other, thus reducing the costs for balancing energy for all pool participants. "In a way, we use the principle of the swarm and add our own intelligence to it," explains Dr. Moritz Buschmann, who is responsible for the market launch as a project manager. In concrete terms, this means, for example, that MET Germany brings together partners in the pool who match or correspond well in terms of their consumption structures.
This creates cost-reducing synergies via a robust system, as market risks can be cushioned cumulatively and excess and shortfalls in consumption can be balanced out in a pooled manner.
Full transparency and the principle of true partnership to create added value for all stakeholders are the guiding principles of product development
In addition, MET Germany's new balancing group pooling further significantly reduces the process efforts, e.g. for the monthly invoice verification for the customers or pool partners. At the same time, MET Germany guarantees full transparency of all details and easy verifiability of all price information and services.
"We are committed to the principle of developing our services and products in such a way that they provide our customers with direct and visible added value, entirely in the sense of a partnership that generates benefits for all parties. In keeping with this principle, we distribute the additional surpluses generated by the product we have developed to the pool partners once at the end of the calendar year," Dr. Buschmann points out in this context.
MET Group
MET Group is an integrated European energy company, headquartered in Switzerland, with activities in natural gas and power markets. MET is present in 14 countries through subsidiaries, 25 national gas markets and 22 international trading hubs. In 2020, MET Group’s consolidated sales revenue amounted to EUR 11,2 billion, the volume of natural gas traded was 71 BCM.