Opportunity is ahead for Europe’s growing fleet of residential battery storage systems in electricity trading, writes Chris Bernkopf, CEO of flexibility and trading platform Podero.
Europe is building storage at a pace that would have seemed extraordinary five years ago. Germany alone has deployed hundreds of thousands of residential batteries. Grid-scale BESS projects are springing up across the continent. And every week, new announcements arrive from markets we used to think of as laggards.
On so many fronts, it’s great news. But a lot of that capacity is either not trading at all or trading into the same small pool of ancillary services markets. They’re at risk of becoming saturated to the point where the economics no longer work.
We’ve built the storage, but we haven’t yet built the smart trading stack to go with it.
For grid-scale battery operators, frequency control reserve (FCR) and automatic frequency restoration reserve (aFRR) ancillary services used to deliver solid, foreseeable returns. But today, those markets are increasingly oversupplied.
