Knowledge

How do you control a battery on the EPEX day-ahead curve?

By translating the daily curve of the EPEX day-ahead market into a charge and discharge programme: charging in the cheap hours, discharging in the expensive ones — within the limits of SoC, connection and contract. The Elteq EMS platform by 1AITE B.V. (Meppel, the Netherlands) executes that arbitrage automatically as one of its battery strategies.

What there is to earn

A battery is more than a buffer: controlled well, it earns on the price difference between trough and peak. The day-ahead curve is known a day in advance, so the programme can be optimised beforehand and monitored intraday.

The constraints are the real work

Arbitrage must never exceed the grid connection or wreck the battery. The Elteq platform therefore controls within hard limits: the contracted capacity (peak shaving comes first), the SoC window of the BMS and the strategy configured per site. For larger systems, FCR/aFRR services on the TenneT imbalance market are also configurable.

More than price alone

The same control combines price steering with self-consumption optimisation and congestion management: negative prices, for example, are also a curtailment signal for solar generation.

Related questions

What is day-ahead arbitrage?

Charging when the EPEX daily price is low and discharging when it is high, so the battery captures the price difference.

Does the platform take my grid connection into account?

Yes — the contracted capacity is a hard limit; peak shaving takes priority over arbitrage.

Can this be combined with FCR or aFRR?

For the larger systems the Elteq platform supports frequency response (FCR/aFRR) towards the TenneT imbalance market, configured per site.

Does this work with any battery?

The platform interfaces with the BMS in a vendor-agnostic way — among others BYD, Tesla, Sungrow ESS and SMA.

Want to talk this through?

Put your situation to 1AITE — we answer with engineering, not a brochure.

Get in touch