Vattenfall and Terralayr have fully commissioned what they say is the industry’s first multi-asset capacity toll for battery energy storage systems (BESS). Following a phased ramp-up, a total of 55 MW of storage capacity is now available to Vattenfall. To achieve this, Terralayr is pooling eight decentralized BESS in Germany into a controllable, aggregated virtual battery via its flexibility platform, LAYR.
Unlike physical battery tolling, the usage is not tied to a single, physically identifiable battery connected and controlled directly by the toller. Nevertheless, unlike purely financially structured virtual tolls, the electricity delivery based on Vattenfall’s signals takes place physically and is backed by a real portfolio of storage systems.
Virtual tolling models of this kind enable energy traders, utilities, or industrial companies to procure urgently needed capacities in a standardized manner, without requiring their own capital investments or incurring operational expenses.
The assets remain within Terralayr’s balancing group and frequency response pool. Vattenfall receives the economically usable flexibility from the aggregated portfolio, while Terralayr handles the technical pooling, dispatch control, and balancing settlement via the LAYR platform.
Model accounts for flexible grid connection agreements
To illustrate how the model works in practice: based on market signals and portfolio needs, Vattenfall might decide to charge 25 MW for one hour and bid 30 MW into the control reserve market to support the grid. The LAYR platform automatically distributes this dispatch request, alongside signals from other off-takers, across the underlying portfolio of storage systems in a load-optimized manner. With this capacity, Vattenfall can serve all wholesale markets as well as the primary and secondary reserve markets.
The portfolio approach reduces dependency on a single storage location. If one storage system fails, LAYR redistributes the dispatch planning to the remaining assets in the portfolio. According to Terralayr, this is particularly helpful in the context of increasingly common curtailments of individual storage systems due to flexible grid connection agreements. The natural degradation of the batteries is also accounted for in the capacity model, meaning the available output follows the guaranteed degradation curves of the integrated storage systems.
Additional storage capacity can be added with a click
Terralayr notes that utilities like Vattenfall can thus procure flexibility without the traditional burden of the operator role. It is achieved without their own investment costs, remains balance-sheet neutral, and is highly scalable, as further physical storage systems can be connected to the LAYR platform in a standardized way and integrated into virtual portfolios.
Furthermore, companies that do not fully utilize their own batteries can market their excess capacity via the LAYR platform, Terralayr stated. Vattenfall would then be able to add this capacity on with a simple click in the future.
“For the marketing of renewable energies, short-term available flexibility is becoming increasingly important,” says Björn Schneegans, Director Commodity Origination at Vattenfall. “The virtual battery portfolio from Terralayr enables us to integrate storage capacity into our trading processes in a scalable manner.”
“This is the first operational multi-asset capacity toll for battery storage in Europe, if not globally – fully delivered and stable in operation,” explains Philipp Man, Co-Founder and CEO of Terralayr. He added that storage flexibility will thus become as easy to procure as cloud capacity: standardized and scalable.
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