This October, the Trading Hub Europe GmbH (THE) marks one year since the start of its commercial operations. It has been a turbulent first year but demonstrated that the gas market convergence was a successful leap. The market area's high-pressure pipeline infrastructure connects more than seven hundred downstream networks and covers the whole German gas market, with a total length of around 40,000 km.

THE not only runs a virtual trading platform for natural gas but also exchanges data with network administrators and people in charge of balancing groups. In addition, THE is responsible for acquiring control energy. This means that energy must be produced to maintain a physical equilibrium when supply and demand differ.
In the last year, a lot has happened in the energy sector. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, THE has evolved into the central gas instrument. THE played a key role in the change of course to purchase LNG and store it in German gas storage facilities to guarantee the security of the gas supply.

Another recent development is that THE was commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and the Federal Network Agency to develop an additional balancing gas product. As a result, the new Load Reduction (LRD) product will allow industrial consumers to make their switch-off potential available to the balancing gas market.

In summary, the gas market convergence from GASPOOL Balancing Services GmbH and NetConnect Germany GmbH & Co. KG towards one central market area THE turned out as a tremendous success especially given the circumstances it had to operate in the last months.

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