The balancing of the system
Commercial balancing consists of the activities required to correctly schedule, account for and allocate the transported gas, as well as the fee system that encourages users to maintain a balance between the volumes they inject into and withdraw from the network.
For this purpose, as of 2016, the following have been operating in the Commercial area:
- Commercial Dispatching (on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), which collects, verifies and processes transport, regasification and storage programmes, and then publishes information to help shippers balance the system;
- traders, who, in addition to guaranteeing the supply of gas functional to the Gas System, carry out transactions on the Gas Exchange functional to the balancing of the System.
Customers and contracts
Over the last fifteen years, the Italian gas market has seen a steady increase in the number of transport operators, from 30 in 2003 to about
210 in 2020,
of which 145 are shippers.
In 2020,
103 connection contracts
were signed for the construction of new delivery/redelivery points (of which 19 for biomethane injection and 35 for the CNG Service Areas or the upgrading of existing points).