Seven two-hour batteries in England sold high volumes of energy in the wholesale market in July 2026, then bought it back in the Balancing Mechanism. All seven finished in the month's ten highest earners, 22% to 31% above the two-hour index.

Scottish batteries have run this trade for years, but always behind a transmission constraint. These seven ran it without one: 99.5% of the energy they bought back was ordinary energy balancing, not constraint management.

They did it most during the morning solar ramp. Those four hours produced 83% of their energy-trading advantage over every other two-hour battery.

For subscribers to Modo Energy's Research, this article will also cover:

• Why this looks like a Scottish strategy but is not constraint-driven
• Why the summer solar ramp created the conditions for it
• Which technologies NESO bought energy back from at dawn
• What made these seven batteries better at it than everyone else
• Why batteries are the cheapest downward flexibility on the system, and how that saved consumers £3.5m in July
• A data download of all charts

This trade was not constraint-driven

The strategy of re-trading energy sold in wholesale and buying back in the Balancing Mechanism is familiar. Scottish batteries sell into the wholesale market and get bought back when the transmission network cannot move their output south, a pattern NESO is examining closely, and one Modo Energy covered in Four batteries 20 miles apart beat the ME BESS GB Index in January.