Last week, EirGrid informed the market of another delay to the volume capped DS3 procurement. This mechanism is to allow the System Operator (SO) to obtain from the market system services necessary to balance the system.
While the procurement delay may cause some disquiet in the market these commercial arrangements are just one of a range of measures to manage the system and ensure that system frequency (in effect a proxy for the shifting demand-supply balance) remains close to the magic 50Hz.
In the year that EirGrid announced the system could accommodate up to 65% SNSP, how well are the web of current tools and system service contracts functioning? In this week’s blog, we get under the skin of the headline SNSP numbers.