With the 60-day lag in ERCOT’s market disclosure data, staying up to date with battery energy storage revenues can feel impossible. However, there are still ways to assess recent opportunities for batteries.
In our new Weekly Briefings, you can track:
- Last week’s grid conditions - and physical battery response.
- Prices across ERCOT’s Day-Ahead, Real-Time, and Ancillary Service markets.
- And the Energy arbitrage spreads available.
Plus, Benchmarking Pro ERCOT subscribers will see:
- Estimated battery revenues from last week (April 8th to 14th).
- An update on Ancillary Service saturation.
- And a run-through of the last full week of revenue data from 60 days ago (February 8th to 14th), to track any trends and patterns in battery strategy.
What did grid conditions in ERCOT look like last week?
Real-Time prices spiked during the solar eclipse on the 8th, and during the evening peak on the 11th.
Battery energy storage net output topped 1 GW on four occasions across the week. This helped to keep the grid stable at key times.
The price spike on April 11th was due to a sharp decrease in available capacity.
And we’re still very much in maintenance season - on average, there were around 26 GW of thermal generation outages throughout the week.
How did all of this affect prices last week?
Real-Time prices remained pretty stable across all regions last week. The biggest divergence occurred on the morning of April 11th. There were multiple negative price periods in the Panhandle Hub.
As you would expect, Ancillary Service prices followed a similar pattern across the week.
What sorts of price spreads were available for battery energy storage systems?
There was also very little regional variation in Day-Ahead prices. However, spreads between Day-Ahead and Real-Time Bus Average prices during the two peaks (solar eclipse on the 8th; evening ramp on the 11th) were $373/MWh and $268/MWh, respectively. This presents a unique opportunity for batteries to take an aggressive position in the Day-Ahead and Real-Time markets via non-physical trading.
Alternatively, examining the Day-Ahead Market in isolation presents price spreads that averaged $84/MWh across the week.
And Real-Time spreads averaged $107/MWh.
What might battery energy storage revenues have looked like last week?
By looking at the prices available, and the actual physical output of battery energy storage systems, we can provide an indicative estimate of battery revenues.