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Comment by chardz

2 days ago

On top of what others have mentioned, this paper also sidesteps forecasting electricity prices, which is already a very complicated problem (particularly in U.S markets where we have zonal pricing) needed to build profitable battery systems that actually operate on the grid.

I've had a few chats with some folks working on battery startups, and I think the more conventional approach is to forecast prices + run an optimization to find optimal storage decisions. You could measure the system's performance by looking at how well the algorithm does when it has perfect information about prices (obviously, when you have perfect information about prices it is trivial to optimize the battery).

Our two follow-up papers are addressing exactly this (for Europe)! We are extending our high-frequency continuous intraday approach (CID) with a forecast-based day-ahead bidding stage, and subsequent CID forecast updates.

I'd also be quite interested in strategies for grid-scale BESS trading in the US' real-time markets. Do you know more about it, or could forward me to someone who would be willing to talk about it? ;)

  • I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with BESS in particular, and the people I spoke to are probably not too keen on sharing much (which is generally true of those who work in U.S markets). Unfortunately it's all very opaque.

    I'd be happy to provide you the names of the firms I spoke to over email, if that would be of use!

    • Yes thank you, that would be at least slightly more refined than me just randomly writing companies which might be relevant! My email is dschaurecker(at)gmail.com, thanks again :)