What: Today, the imbalance settlement period in the Nordics is 60 minutes. From 22 May 2023 the common Nordic imbalance settlement, eSett, will settle Nordic balance responsible parties (BRPs) with 15 min resolution. The remaining steps, such as 15 min imbalance price and 15 min cross border trading in Intraday, will be implemented in Q2 2024.

How: The Nordic DSOs will change the granularity of meters, dependent on national legislation, from 60 to 15 minutes. eSett will settle the quarterly imbalances between planned and actual consumption/production of the balance responsible parties (BRPs). Except for in Norway, 15 min intraday trading within the bidding zones will be possible for the NEMOs to implement from 22 May 2023. The imbalance price will remain in hourly resolution until Q2 2024 when the mFRR energy activation market switches to a quarterly marginal price and thus enabling a quarterly imbalance price in the imbalance settlement. At the same time cross border intraday trade with 15 min resolution will be implemented.

Why: While production and consumption plans derived from the energy markets are flat within each market time unit (MTU), consumption continuously changes. Production changes more instantaneously from one MTU to the next. This leads to structural imbalances that the TSOs must handle. Moving to 15-minute MTU and ISP reduces these imbalances.