Held on 21 March 2007 at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre
In a well attended first meeting of the Forum, Peter Mills-Baker delivered an excellent presentaion on the operation of the National Transmission System. The presentation is available here, but note that it is over five megabytes in size. He discussed:
- An overview of the landing sites for gas in the UK and their relative importance (strategically and in terms of volumes).
- How the gas is transported and an overview of the NTS.
- How the system is balanced on a daily basis and what software/hardware system(s) are used to monitor it.
- Nominations and how are they processed by the operator.
- How the system becomes long or short and how the operator establishes the state of the system and seeks to rebalance it.
- The nature of capacity auctions, who bids in them, and how often they are held.
- How the operator establishes whether gas shippers have met their contractual obligations or not, and deadlines for the submission of allocation statements to the operator.
- Whether users of the system can try to manipulate the state of the system to their advantage and if so, what is done about it.
- The nature of penalties attributable to system users.
- The role of Interconnector: what sort of volumes does it handle; who is responsible for it; what impact does it have on the UK gas market.
- The role of LNG in the future and the impact it will have on the UK gas market.
- The responsibilities of the grid operator and the role of the DTI and Ofgem in its operations.
Feedback from the forum attendees was universally positive, with 100% of attendees saying that they would attend subsequent meetings.