As far as hot industry topics go, the fact that European battery storage is moving into a more complicated trading phase is one that insiders talk about and explore more than most.
The pattern across early years to mid-stage operations is well known: early projects in markets such as Great Britain could rely heavily on ancillary services, but growing battery builds and operating fleets have increased competition for a finite pool of grid services and demand. The topic now is a longer-term play.
“The easy money is over,” Helmut Spindler, general manager for trading and optimization at Volue, told ESS News. “Just putting a battery into FCR is what everyone did in Germany and the UK, where it is called Dynamic Containment, and that became saturated.”
The broader shift is already visible in revenue data, while arbitrage is only one piece of the pie as well, as recently discussed here via insights from Portugal.
European market analysis has shown profitability becoming more dependent on combinations of wholesale, intraday, and balancing revenues, while ancillary-service prices have weakened in some markets. In Germany, continuous intraday trading has repeatedly ranked among the strongest standalone revenue streams during 2026.
For battery operators, that means deciding essentially continuously where a limited amount of capacity is most valuable.
“The challenge now is to participate in different markets at the same time: day-ahead, intraday, ancillary capacity and activations, and imbalance, and to move capacity between them during the day,” Spindler said.
That argument forms the basis of Volue’s new white paper, From Asset to Algorithm. As more batteries are connected and system costs have fallen, hardware assets themselves are rarely the source of differentiation. For two identical batteries, the differences can be vast between types of grid access (ramp rates, for example), market access and trading capability, and performance as increasingly important factors.
It is also an argument that fits Volue’s own business model. The company sells forecasting, optimization and trading software rather than operating batteries under a conventional revenue-sharing agreement. Spindler, when questioned, argues that this distinction matters because batteries placed in the same aggregation pool can be exposed to the same forecasts and trading strategy.
For Spindler, the largest differences are in the decisions made around these very factors, along with cycling.
“Most of the money is in this decision,” he said of allocating capacity between markets. “Then there is intraday execution, trading continuously with algorithms, not once a day.”
Cycling strategy adds another constraint. Each trade can earn revenue but also consumes part of the battery’s useful life.
“A good setup prices the degradation cost of every cycle into the trade. It doesn’t cycle for a small spread and it doesn’t blow the warranty,” Spindler said. “That can mean less revenue this year, but less augmentation capex later.”
That makes trading strategy part of the investment case rather than something decided only after commissioning.
“The best setup today may not be the best setup in two years, and the ancillary-heavy business cases from 2022 are the proof,” Spindler said.
A secondary point concerns control. Rather than asking only which optimizer produces the highest headline revenue, Spindler frames the question as “who is in the cockpit.”
“In an aggregation pool you get the pool’s strategy and the pool’s result, and you can’t change either,” he said. “With your own software and your own intelligence, you decide the strategy, you see every trade, and you can find optimal strategies that give you an edge.”
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