We’re often asked who the best BESS optimiser is in GB. The answer is always ‘it depends’. To borrow an F1 analogy from Ed Porter: the optimiser is the driver, and the battery is the car. Even the best optimiser can’t win where hardware and location set a limit on performance. A 5 year old, half-hour battery in England is naturally going to perform worse than a brand new, two-hour battery in Scotland. In Tesla’s case, they’re both the car and the driver, supplying their Megapack systems to BESS owners and trading them on their behalf. According to Modo Energy data, they’ve been pretty good at it so far. It was great to contribute to this article, part of the Financial Times series on mega-batteries. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eeuBgJJq
Really cool to see the FT picking up the story of storage’s growth in power markets. On benchmarking, absolutely, that’s why you need to select comparable assets in a custom index and to pick up another favourite, you can of course rank by £/MWh too. I’d say the F1 analogy falls down on location, as you also need to compare for similar regions, given markets are locational.
Great analogy, it captures the evolving reality perfectly. Optimisation is no longer just about algorithms; it’s about aligning temporal flexibility, degradation strategy, and locational signals. As the market shifts toward multi-service stacking, the best “driver” will be the one who can see the race across time, not just laps.
As always it's important to dig into the data behind the nice visualisation! This chart seems to plot all battery systems, regardless of duration, and regardless whether they have been operating for one month or 10 months. Of course it is nice to see positive talk of energy storage in the mainstream press, and it does produce a nice picture that looks kind of like a cool shark, but in my view seems a rather selective use of statistics by the FT!
An interesting bulge below 60k £/MWyear. Are these "1-hour" systems?
I’m hopeful one day someone will explain F1 to me using battery sites and optimisers
Data science will always outperform Human teams
Very interesting… I wonder what the picture would be if the assesment is per MWh and not MW..
I would imagine this changes fairly substantially if you grouped by zone and then adjusted for MWh?
expect to see Ecolibrium by Ecotricity outperforming soon :)
Trading and Flexibility @ Reel
2wWould be nice to see that chart normalized per MWh