German Energy Policy Brief before 2025 elections

With Germany on the brink of a pivotal election, we want to share our high-level views on energy policy and the key considerations for voters. We’ve outlined five fundamental theses to keep this concise and to the point.

Electricity (cross-product) price volatility has historically been closely linked to overall price levels. This trend seems to have ended in 2024 in Germany, as low marginal cost renewables are pushing the overall wholesale price level down, while peakers such as gas and batteries need to finance their investments in relatively few but increasingly expensive production hours

The “science” of modelling past and future revenues of battery energy storage systems (BESS)

Over the last year we became increasingly involved with the “science” of modelling past and future revenues of battery energy storage systems (BESS) and now decided to shed some light on this practice. We believe that customers are being sold a lot of voodoo for science and that the incentives in this industry are not at all well aligned.

We are often asked how the financial optimization (or: arbitrage) of a battery across the different market places of the spot market works. We show this x-market optimization here by way of example focusing on the day-ahead spot market (hourly auction at 12 noon), intraday quarter-hourly auction (at 3 p.m.) and the so-called intraday continuous market (quarter-hourly products up to five minutes before delivery).