At the Renewable Energy Revenues Summit 2024, a panel praised National Grid ESO’s role in facilitating the market and suggested that third-party optimisation may not be commoditising as some had anticipated.
BESS developer-operator Masdar Arlington Energy’s head of commercial operations Paul Soskin said that, in criticising National Grid for being slow to reform the Balancing Mechanism (BM), people forget how much the operator has done for the BESS market.
“It’s not their fault that we have such an overwhelming amount of BESS online, it’s because they’ve been so open and enabled so much functionality for BESS. They’ve done a remarkable job,” Soskin said on the the Reality of Battery Revenues panel discussion on Day 2.
Optimisation has not become a commodity
Talk turned to optimisation companies, which are contracted by virtually every BESS project in the UK to play into electricity markets and maximise revenue. As covered on Energy Storage News, some have said in the past that the widespread use of third-party optimisers for risked becoming commoditised.
Strategy head at another developer-operator Field, Alexa Strobel, said: “One thing that’s interesting is that regardless of who’s doing it, if you look at the optimisers and what they optimise, there are so many different trading strategies employed, even varying for the same asset from month to month. There was a time when we thought optimisers would become a commodity, everyone would be doing the same thing, and revenues would bottom out, but we are seeing a massive range of strategies.”
Masdar’s Soskin added: “I love that two batteries can be in the same location but if they have different optimisers they will have completely different load profiles and revenue stacks.”
This article is based on one originally published on Energy-Storage.news (Premium access). The event, which took place from 21-23 May, was the third edition of the Summit, which brings together offtakers, generators, asset owners, and financiers in the clean energy market. See the website for more information.
