Markets and Customers

The Gas Market

The late but fast liberalized gas market offers optimization potentials and risks, as the electricity market


Liberalization and chances


The liberalization of the gas markets has been chasing the one of the electricity markets for a long time. During the last years the process of liberalization has started speeding up. While until recently there had been no optimization potentials in terms of gas procurement due to long-term contracts and normally oil-price bound price escalation clause, today by means of fast adaptation and new market conditions, chances in the area of energy costs, as well as transfer costs exist.

Price trends and volatility

Connected to oil and coal prices, for the gas price a long-term trend with short-term volatility developed. The liberalization is implemented by a simplfied network utilization model, fixed-price-long-term-contracts improved balance compensation regulation, stronger separation of network and energy sales, and reduction of the number of single market areas. Similarly to the electricity market, therefore strong optimization potentials, respectivle the necessity for actions, result to be well positioned in terms of cost efficiency compared to competituon.