How No-Notice Imbalances Are Reconciled: The Monthly True-Up Process

While a No-Notice Agreement allows an LDC to temporarily balance the city gate using storage, that is only the first step.

The real work of assigning responsibility happens weeks later during the monthly reconciliation process.

Here’s why this process is so complex:

Every day, gas from two different streams flows through the city gate — the LDC’s own supply and gas from multiple third-party marketers. At the end of each gas day, the actual volume taken rarely matches the total nominated volume. The LDC initially absorbs this difference using its storage, but eventually someone must be held financially responsible.

To determine who is responsible, the LDC must go through every delivery point behind the city gate. Large industrial customers and power plants submit daily nominations, so their usage can be directly compared to what they nominated. However, the vast majority of residential and small commercial customers do not nominate. For these customers, the LDC uses sophisticated forecasting methods based on weather, historical usage patterns, and other factors to estimate what they should have taken.

Once all the actual meter readings are collected and compared against these nominations and estimates, the LDC can finally calculate exactly where the imbalances occurred. They must then determine not just whether the imbalance was caused by their own customers or a third-party’s customers, but specifically which marketer’s customers were responsible.

Only then can the true-up be completed. Marketers who took more gas than nominated must reimburse the LDC, while those who took less may receive a credit. This monthly reconciliation ensures that while the LDC temporarily carries the balancing burden, everyone is ultimately made whole based on actual consumption.

In the Ascend course, we break down this entire monthly reconciliation process so you can understand how responsibility is finally determined after the fact.