Day-ahead Rates

In 2005, AGCS requested the operators of storage facilities in Austria to make free storage capacities available in the event of bottlenecks to their balancing energy providers in order for these providers to be able to place additional supplies on the tertiary control reserve market. OMV Gas GmbH agreed to jointly develop with AGCS a product "day-ahead rates". This storage product is not part of the market rules but is a voluntary service – revocable at any time – offered by the storage facility operator OMV Gas GmbH.

This storage product is available only after the re-opening of the tertiary control reserve market to balancing energy providers which have entered into contracts for storage capacities with OMV Gas GmbH.

The product, day-ahead rates (DAR) provides the tertiary control reserve market with unused storage capacities. Balancing energy providers that have gas volumes at their disposal may offer additional volumes of gas on the tertiary control reserve market by using the storage product DAR that otherwise would not be available to the tertiary control reserve market due to the contractual limits of the storage capacities.

The available free storage capacities are allocated to the balancing energy providers in equal parts taking into account their demands. The rights of the balancing energy providers to these free storage capacities are thus identical irrespective of the size of the balancing energy provider or the already contracted storage capacities or volumes.