How optimisation unlocks the full value of your battery investment

Anyone who’s looked into battery energy storage systems (BESS) will know that a battery by itself – straightforwardly storing cheap power to displace peak rate demand – will lower your energy costs. While it may also be an indispensable way to maximise the return from onsite solar or wind, it could still take many years to repay your investment through arbitrage – buying power cheaply and using it when it's expensive – alone.

While arbitrage can deliver worthwhile savings, putting battery assets to work in the markets that the National Energy System Operator (NESO) uses to keep the grid balanced can unlock additional revenue streams and significantly strengthen the business case.

Batteries optimised to participate in these markets move continually between revenue opportunities as conditions change – providing a grid service one moment or trading in the wholesale market the next, always directed by the most valuable use of the asset at that point in time. Capturing that value in real time, across multiple markets at once, is beyond manual operation: it takes automated dispatch and live market access.

This is the role that Enel X plays as an optimiser and aggregator of flexible energy. Our virtual power plant (VPP) pools and manages battery assets, participating in these markets on your behalf to earn the maximum return across a range of grid services.

Those services are best thought of as levers that NESO can pull when it has a problem to solve:

• Frequency response handles sudden drops or surges in electricity, with the battery reacting in seconds
• Reserve services are called at short notice to help balance the system
• The balancing mechanism takes bids and offers based on near real-time conditions
• Network charge optimisation shifts your charging and discharging to avoid the most expensive periods
• The Capacity Market provides availability payments for being there when the grid needs reliable capacity

One of the strengths of BESS assets is that they’re ideally suited to participation in all these markets, tapping into the full value stack for maximal returns. And crucially, they can be enrolled without changing how you run your operations. The battery acts as a buffer: providing the response while your production line carries on as normal.

The savings are significant from small assets, right through to very large ones. A four-megawatt battery that we modelled over fifteen years came out at around £4.39 million of value to the asset owner, with roughly £403,000 in the first year alone. That value is from several sources at once: wholesale trading, the Capacity Market, bill savings, the balancing mechanism, and frequency response.

In this example, wholesale trading was the biggest revenue generator, but this is where a common misunderstanding comes up – that manufacturers on a fixed or hedged supply contract can’t trade on the wholesale market. That’s not the case: your supply deal stays exactly as it is and we simply treat the battery's charging and discharging as movements around it. That lets you benefit from wholesale prices when it makes sense to, without giving up the security of your long-term contract.

The details matter, particularly the type of Capacity Market position secured. Some providers can only offer a one-year-ahead (T-1) position, worth around £5,000 per megawatt for the 2026/27 Delivery Year. By contrast, Enel X secured capacity for that same single Delivery Year through the T-4 auction, with the price agreed four years in advance, at £63,000 per megawatt. That difference can significantly improve a project’s viability and returns.

Whatever the scale of the battery you’re considering, optimisation revenue is a fundamental that could make the numbers look completely different, and transform the business case. For food and drink manufacturers, the value of a battery lies in how it's optimised – and a battery worked intelligently across these markets is what turns a good investment into a solidly commercial one.