Balance agreement

A balance agreement (bilansileping) is the contract between Elering and a BRP under which Elering buys or sells the imbalance energy needed to keep the BRP's portfolio in balance each trading period. Without a balance agreement, no commercial activity on the Estonian wholesale electricity market is possible.

What the agreement covers

Three core mechanics: (1) the BRP submits day-ahead and intraday schedules to Elering; (2) at the end of every imbalance settlement period, Elering measures actual flows, compares against schedule, and bills the BRP at the imbalance price for any deviation; (3) Elering provides open supply — covering shortfalls and absorbing surpluses — under the same agreement. The balance agreement is the legal instrument that ties the BRP into the imbalance settlement system.

Prerequisites

Becoming a counterparty to a balance agreement requires: a legal entity registered in Estonia or in an EEA Member State with cross-border equivalence, a financial guarantee (typically a bank guarantee or cash collateral), Datahub integration, sub-metering at imbalance-settlement granularity, and twenty-four-hour operational availability. The Estonian register of active BRPs is short — on the order of ten to fifteen entities — and the bar to join is non-trivial.

Why it matters for aggregators

A small flexibility provider — say, an aggregator running a few hundred home batteries — could in principle hold its own balance agreement, but the operational cost is high. Most aggregators contract with a larger BRP that has the agreement and absorbs the imbalance flow. Volton holds its own balance agreement, which lets it run the BRP/BSP stack end-to-end without an intermediary.