Vienna Energy HUB meeting: all about BESS and energy transition
Last week, I attended the Energy HUB meeting in Vienna, sponsored by marbl. It was an exciting event with presentations from software vendors, energy companies, and research institutes, all coming together to discuss the industry’s most urgent needs.
What are those needs? They are clearly tied to the energy transition, network stability, and regulatory compliance related to intraday trading. One of the most discussed assets in this context was industrial-scale batteries, as these are key to network stability, cross-market trading, and analytics.
The situation with batteries in the European markets resembles a gold rush. In 2024 alone, European companies added 10 GW of BESS capacity. The plans for future installations are equally impressive. However, the queue of projects waiting for network access is long. As one presenter puts it: the queue for TSO analysis and approval for network connections is the only limiting factor for the massive inflow of projects.
In practice, industrial-scale battery assets are proving profitable, especially if they can be traded on both ancillary service and wholesale power markets. At the same time, the rapid inflow of BESS projects is putting profitability at risk due to the cannibalization effect. The higher the market volatility, the more profitable battery trading becomes. But the more batteries enter the market, the greater their dampening effect on volatility. In this way, batteries end up cannibalizing their own markets.
So, when will the battery market in Europe reach saturation? Austria’s major energy supplier, Verbund, gave a presentation exploring this question. While the exact timeline is uncertain, the example of the UK, which is a more advanced European market in terms of demand-side flexibility and battery participation, shows that, when trading is limited to ancillary markets, saturation can occur in as little as two years. However, once wholesale market was included, profitability has recovered.
Many other aspects of battery-related topics were highlighted by additional presenters. The lifecycle of battery projects requires multiple tools and analyses, from profitability estimates and techno-economic system component studies to operational management. The Austrian Institute of Technology provides these services, including profitability calculations that combine market forecasting, detailed component data, and battery optimization based on market simulations. They develop proprietary software to cover the entire value chain from data input to forecasting, optimization, simulations, and output.
The conference sponsor, marbl., is a company specializing in software solutions for cross-market battery optimization. Such tools are extremely valuable in today’s market, given the rapid rise of battery projects, where optimal utilization directly determines profitability. At the same time, industrial batteries are highly complex, and most risk analytics and short-term trading software do not yet support battery optimization. This makes companies like marbl. particularly valuable as potential partners for battery analytics.
Keep in touch and sign up to our Newsletter
