To go alongside the publication of our January 2022 Leaderboard, Alex and Imrith discuss battery energy storage system (BESS) trends and strategies from last month. Watch below to see how these have shaped the Leaderboard.

Leaderboard analysis

Fleet revenues

Figure 1 (below) shows the average fleet revenues for BESS assets in Great Britain (GB).

Average earnings (£/MW) for BESS assets in January grew 9.63% from December 2021. This is largely driven by increasing revenues in monthly Firm Frequency Response (FFR) revenues since last month as a result of higher accepted bid prices.

Asset revenues

Figure 2 (below) shows the revenues of assets from Modo’s Leaderboard in January 2022.

Asset strategies can be split into three categories:

• Strictly FFR;
• Dynamic Containment (DC) and merchant markets; and
• hybrid (DC, FFR, and merchant markets).

Figure 3 (below) shows asset revenues for the different operational strategies taken in January 2022.

• The average revenue for BESS assets solely providing FFR was £11,761/MW, 6.05% lower than in December 2021.
• The average revenue for assets adopting hybrid strategies (FFR, DC and merchant) was £12,486/MW, 6.16% higher than those strictly providing FFR.

Further analysis - January markets in review

DC clearing prices

Saturation in DC has caused huge price volatility, with DC (low) prices as high as £47.99/MW/h and low as £0.01/MW/h. Figure 4 (below) shows the clearing prices for January 2022.

FFR vs. DC

Figure 5 (below) shows the accepted bids in FFR for the twenty assets that participated in the service during January 2022, against the average clearing prices (volume-weighted) in DC for each EFA block.

• The top two assets (Larport Farm and Breach Farm) on this months Leaderboard had the highest accepted average bid prices across EFA blocks 5 and 6 (£43.74/MW/h).
• Wickham Market, the asset with the highest FFR revenues, had an average bid acceptance across all EFA blocks was £19.25/MW/h.

BESS activity in the BM

In January 2022, Balancing Mechanism (BM) revenues only made up 0.92% of GB BESS fleet average revenues. Figure 6 (below) shows the daily BM revenues for all BMU registered BESS assets.

Wholesale prices

Huge price spikes in wholesale markets seem to be the new normal. Evening peaks exceeded clearing prices of £1,000/MWh three times throughout the month in Nordpool’s day-ahead hourly auction, as highlighted below in Figure 7.