“All batteries have warranties and long-term service agreements that they need to take into account when you’re optimising their trading,” he says.
“Sometimes those constraints can actually change the trading behaviour in a way that would result in weird outcomes.”
Karimi points to South Australia’s price cap event on 21 June 2026 as an illustration of what can go wrong when those constraints aren’t properly integrated into a battery’s dispatch strategy.
Prices in the state’s SA1 region hit the National Electricity Market’s (NEM) AU$20,300/MWh (US$14,654) cap twice in a single evening, with the region’s fleet of grid-scale batteries capturing a combined AU$324,000 in revenue, though performance across individual assets varied sharply.
Karimi previously told ESN Premium that the divergent outcomes among the state’s 15 grid-scale battery storage systems came down largely to state of charge management and bidding strategy rather than raw capacity, with some assets capturing meaningful revenue while others were caught charging into the cap itself.
