The EU electric power system experiences a fundamental change in the quasi-monopolistic, top-down oriented, stable, and reasonable predictable arrangements of the past. It now spans continents, has hundreds of millions consumers and hundreds of thousands of producers, from nuclear power plants to privately-owned and operated badly predictable renewables such as solar cells, wind and microturbines and operates in an increasingly liberalized market. These developments pose huge challenges for its reliable and economic operation. This proposal focuses on the real-time power imbalance in the power net, which arises as a consequence of errors in the prediction of both production and demand. As this power imbalance will increase both in size and in frequency, presents arrangements to cope with this imbalance are no longer valid. They are neither reliable nor economic anymore. This project proposes an advanced ICT and control framework for ancillary services (reserve capacity) which allows a more intelligent solution by giving consumers and producers clear, real-time financial incentives to adapt their consumption/production according to the actual needs of the power system. This design is based on a distributed control structure, enabled by a fast ICT infrastructure and advanced control theory to reliably and economically deal with the necessary ancillary services. Decisions by consumers, producers, power exchanges and TSOs can be taken locally, based on local or national preferences and regulation. Still, the embedded incentives of the proposed framework can guarantee that all these local decisions together contribute to the global objectives of the EE power net: a reliable electric energy supply at the lowest costs.Instead of investing in additional expensive and environment-unfriendly reserve production or storage facilities with a low utilization rate, the reliability and economy are enforced by intelligent ICT and control.