Portugal's Indie Energy Explores Multi-Market Revenue Models for Energy Storage, Managing Over 400 MW

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 18, Indie Energy, a Portuguese energy digital operations company, disclosed that its platform currently manages and optimizes renewable energy assets with an installed capacity exceeding 400 MW, and has cumulatively participated in market trading for over 500 GWh of electricity. The company is evaluating entry into the Spanish market while developing hybrid photovoltaic, wind power, and energy storage projects, with plans to have energy storage assets simultaneously participate in the day-ahead market, intraday market, and power system ancillary services.

The virtual power plant platform operated by Indie Energy connects generators, electricity consumers, balancing responsible parties, and system balancing service providers. It can participate in day-ahead and intraday electricity trading and provide system services such as automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR) and manual Frequency Restoration Reserve (mFRR). In its energy community business, the platform is currently adopted by approximately 10 management entities, covering 50 collective self-consumption projects, involving more than 250 consumers and 80 generation entities, corresponding to an installed capacity of over 5 MW and an annual shared electricity volume exceeding 1 GWh.

In terms of energy storage operation strategy, the company incorporates grid connection point capacity, facility power balance, battery state of charge, cycle count, and battery degradation into its optimization model. Battery charging and discharging as well as photovoltaic inverter operating points must be determined within grid connection capacity constraints. Energy storage can absorb electricity during periods of excess photovoltaic output and shift discharge periods to higher-priced 15-minute settlement intervals. The company also directly incorporates battery degradation costs into the optimization objective and controls the state of charge range and maximum charge-discharge cycle count based on manufacturer parameters.

In terms of system services, Indie Energy disclosed that energy storage projects can obtain different revenue streams through aFRR, mFRR, and technical constraint management. Among these, aFRR requires equipment to begin responding within 30 seconds and complete activation within 5 minutes; the maximum activation time for mFRR is 12.5 minutes. The energy storage grid connection technical requirements being advanced in Portugal also involve Grid Forming operation, synthetic inertia, frequency response, and system observability and control capabilities. Energy storage facilities of different power levels and connection voltage levels need to meet corresponding technical conditions.

The company believes that as more batteries enter the power system, the price spread between periods of high solar output and high-priced evening periods may narrow, and peak-valley arbitrage relying solely on buying low and selling high will face revenue compression. Its current strategy is to combine the day-ahead market, intraday market, system services, energy communities, and self-consumption management into a single optimization system, forming an energy storage business model through the stacking of multi-market revenues.