Feasibility study of implicit balancing in the Slovak power system using battery storage

¹ University of Zilina, Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, 010 26 Zilina, Slovakia
² INO-HUB Energy j.s.a., Slovakia

^* Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published online: 11 June 2026

Abstract

Recently, a debate about proposed changes in rules governing the interaction between Slovak energy markets and the Slovak power transmission network reached a mainstream media, while opposing views on expected impacts of newly proposed imbalance settlement mechanism were presented. The proposed changes were justified by the expected reduction in implicit balancing that should lead to more favorable prices for industrial end consumers. Being motivated by this debate, we present a forecasting model for the imbalance settlement price, and we evaluate simple implicit balancing strategies while using battery storage. Our goal is to assess how difficult it is to derive some economic profit from implicit balancing while using publicly available data. The results show that implicit balancing can generate a positive gross profit, but it is not sufficient to fully cover storage-related costs, which plays a decisive role in the economic viability of BESS-based implicit balancing.