​The battery market is getting more competitive, and strong performance depends on understanding what drives it across the market, the asset, and the operator. Riverina 1 and 2 are near-identical batteries, sharing a New South Wales connection point, owner, duration and market conditions. Even so, Riverina 1 earned around $14k/MW more in FY26.

​Ko makes it easy to benchmark performance across assets and isolate the metrics behind the edge, so you can apply what works to your own battery. It compares revenue against capture rates, value lost, cycling, local prices and bid behaviour to show where the opportunities sit.

This article works through that process with Riverina 1 and 2, using Ko to find what sets one apart from the other.

Benchmark your asset against the wider fleet with Ko

​Benchmarking Riverina 1 against the fleet shows where it ranks on revenue. Ko breaks down how each New South Wales battery earned revenue through FY26, and which markets brought in the revenue.

​Energy arbitrage dominated the fleet, usually 95% or more of revenue. Riverina 1 earned $76,285/MW, the most of any battery that ran the full year and almost entirely from energy. Wallgrove is the FCAS outlier, earning around $14,500/MW there, close to a fifth of its total.

Riverina 1 captured 72.3%, ahead of Darlington Point on 64.9% and Riverina 2 on 63.3%, then Wallgrove 53.7%, Capital 51.0% and Broken Hill 50.0%. Still-commissioning assets sit far below the field, Waratah lowest at 6.5% after an extraordinary $273,672/MW lost to unavailability.

Uncaptured revenue is the largest single loss for almost every full-year asset. It is the value inside the adjusted potential that a battery did not realise. The Riverina cluster shares an almost identical constraint signature of around $24,600/MW, pointing to a common transmission bottleneck on that corridor. Riverina 1 also carries a large loss-factor haircut of $15,579/MW, reflecting the region’s below-unity marginal loss factor.

Use Ko to identify when the performance gap opened

Once Ko has separated structural losses from trading outcomes, Riverina 1 becomes the most useful benchmark for Riverina 2. The two assets share the same connection point and duration, but have different operators.

Riverina 1 ran 322 equivalent full cycles against Riverina 2’s 272. It led every month from July to December. Riverina 2 then took the lead from January to April. On revenue, the two separated steadily from July, and by the end of January Riverina 1 was $14,825/MW ahead. From February the gap barely moves, finishing the year at $13,974/MW.

Trace the gap back to one trading day

​The comparison sharpens in January, when Riverina 2 discharged more than Riverina 1 but still earned $2,907/MW less. Most of that gap came from 10 January, the highest-value day of the year for New South Wales batteries, which alone added $3,363/MW to Riverina 1’s lead.

Riverina 1 charged to roughly full by 10:15, held through the afternoon, then discharged steadily from about 17:40 and was near empty by 20:00. Riverina 2 settled at a high state of charge from around 15:30 and only discharged through the evening peak between 19:00 and 20:20, emptying by the end.

Both batteries saw identical local prices, because they share the same network constraint. From 16:00 they were heavily constrained at around -$1,000/MWh even as the New South Wales price climbed past $300. Through the spike, the regional price reached $11,938/MWh. The Riverina local price barely moved, staying near -$1,000. The constraint eased from 19:45. Local price governs whether a unit is dispatched; it is not the settlement price.

Riverina 1 reduced its offer from $326.79/MWh to the floor at 17:40, and held there until it emptied at 20:05. Riverina 2 held a $1,298.89 offer and did not commit to the floor until 18:30. Riverina 1 held the lower offer and was dispatched ahead of Riverina 2. Both units sat at the floor together from around 19:00.

What asset owners should take away

​Riverina 1 and Riverina 2 looked like a clean comparison, sharing a connection point, duration and regional prices. Once Ko separated the structural factors from the operating outcome, the gap came down to how each asset traded. Most of it built up over the first half of the year, and 10 January showed the mechanism most clearly.

Capture rate, lost value and a close comparison give you a clear read on where an operator can actually improve, by separating what the market and the asset hand you from what you earn through trading. On Riverina 2, that pointed straight at the highest-value days, where Riverina 1 reached the market floor 50 minutes earlier and took the limited headroom first in a constrained corridor.

You can run the same steps on any battery. Benchmark it against the fleet, compare it with a similar asset, then trace the gap to the day, the price signal and the bidding behind it.