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Ofgem publishes Frontier report on National Grid's Gas Demand Forecasting

The UK energy regulator, Ofgem, has today published a Frontier report which investigates the methodology that National Grid uses to forecast gas demand. The study has been released as part of the second stage of National Grid's consultation on its Winter Outlook report.

The Winter Outlook Report provides an assessment of the UK's ability to ensure gas supplies over the coming winter for 2006/07. Gas demand forecasting is clearly a crucial ingredient to such an assessment. This years Winter Outlook report is likely to receive more attention than usual, given the events over the course of the last winter, in particular an unanticipated outage at the Rough storage facility. This outage, which coincided with a prolonged spell of cold weather, resulted in extremely high prices in gas wholesale markets.

Frontier's report identifies a number of recommendations for improvements to National Grid's methodology.