​Merchant battery energy storage revenues in ERCOT depend increasingly on energy arbitrage. Ancillary services markets are saturated, so owners and optimizers of batteries now compete for available spread capture at their respective nodes.

A battery’s ability to maximize the percentage of its available top-and-bottom spread opportunity at its node, or its capture rate, is the cleanest way to measure operational success. However, capture rate can vary substantially month-to-month and operator-to-operator, both due to execution and how price formation played out.

This article is a guided tour of six interactive dashboards that let you interrogate capture rate data at whatever scope matters to you: a single battery over a specific week, an optimizer’s full portfolio across two years, or a load zone during a specific weather event.

Every dashboard covers Real-Time and Day-Ahead capture rates from January 2023 through April 2026, with toggles for market, duration bucket, and date range.

​What’s inside

Six interactive dashboards track how batteries in ERCOT convert price spreads into revenue, from January 2023 through April 2026. Each one answers a different question:

• Fleet-aggregate capture over time — how Real-Time and Day-Ahead capture rates have moved month to month, and how the two compare in any window you choose.
• Captured versus missed revenue — how much of the available per-kilowatt-month opportunity the average battery actually converted, split by market.
• Capture by owner, optimizer, or QSE — where each participant sits against the fleet average, and how consistent it is month to month.
• Per-battery ranking — where any individual battery lands in the fleet distribution, with its realized-versus-missed revenue alongside its capture rate.
• Capture by load zone — how Houston, North, South, and West diverge during scarcity and converge when prices behave uniformly.
• Node-versus-hub basis — how a battery’s nodal spread premium relates to how much of that spread it captures.

​Capture rate is net revenue divided by TBX opportunity. TBX is the daily top-minus-bottom price spread, computed at each battery's own node and matched to its physical duration. A 2-hour battery is benchmarked against TB-2; a 1.5-hour battery against TB-1.5 in Real-Time and TB-2 in Day-Ahead. Net revenue is the battery's total realized wholesale revenue, including both Day-Ahead and Real-Time energy plus all ancillary services.

See Modo Energy's Indices and Benchmarking methodology for more.

​Ask Ko, free

​Ko is Modo Energy's AI analyst, and anyone can try it free by signing up for a Modo Energy account.

Ko can read the data behind every dashboard below, so you can ask it to dig into a specific battery, optimizer, or load zone and work with you toward a conclusion rather than just restate what a chart shows.

It handles capture-rate questions directly, pulls in Modo Energy's wider research library for context, and can also help users understand other parts of Modo Energy, like how the long-term BESS revenues forecast is built.

Find a pattern in the charts below, then ask Ko why it's there.

​Aggregate capture rate, RT vs DA over time

What the chart shows. Real-Time and Day-Ahead fleet-aggregate capture rates for ERCOT BESS, monthly by default, from January 2023 forward.

How it is derived. Sum of realized per-MW revenue across all active batteries in each month, divided by sum of matched-TBX per MW over the same period. Each battery contributes weighted by its size.

How to use it.

• Toggle between "all batteries" and specific duration buckets to see whether a shift is uniform across the fleet or concentrated in one duration.
• Use the date-range picker to isolate a specific quarter or event, then compare Real-Time and Day-Ahead lines.
• Hover any month to see the underlying revenue and TBX numbers.
• The dashed 100% line marks parity with the TBX benchmark. Points above it indicate ancillary services revenue stacking on top of the energy-arbitrage benchmark.

​Modo Energy subscribers can continue scrolling through to see data that allows:

• Fleet-wide average revenue and TBX opportunity per kilowatt-month,
• Capture rate by owner, optimizer, or operator (QSE),
• Per-battery and per-portfolio captured versus missed revenue, in both DAM and RTM,
• Capture rate by ERCOT load zone,
• Nodal basis and how it influences capture rate.

Creating a free Modo Energy account unlocks the dashboards below for new users: free accounts include three paid articles each month, and this is one of them.

​Monthly captured revenue inside the TBX opportunity

What the chart shows. Average revenue across all batteries and TBX opportunity per kilowatt-month, stacked as bars, with Real-Time and Day-Ahead side by side.

Fleet total revenue divided by fleet total capacity, per month, per market (see ). The dark portion is realized net revenue. The light portion is unrealized opportunity, computed as matched-TBX minus revenue.