Great Britain · 217 sites · 7,194 MW
The UK BESS fleet, what it earns and how
Every grid scale battery in Great Britain that was paid by the grid operator in the 364 days to 19 August 2026. That is 217 sites holding 7,194 MW, which is very nearly the whole working fleet.
Click a circle for one site. The bigger the circle the more megawatts it can push. The darker the colour the more it earned for each kilowatt it has.
Click a circle for one site. The bigger the circle the more megawatts it can push. The darker the colour the more it earned for each kilowatt it has.
A battery earns from four places. Two of them are public
Balancing. The grid operator pays a battery to change what it is doing at short notice, to keep supply and demand matched minute by minute. Public, per site, and counted here.
Standing ready. It also pays a battery simply to be available to respond, whether or not it is ever called. Public, per site, and counted here. Together these two came to £193.8m.
Buying low and selling high. A battery makes money charging when power is cheap and discharging when it is dear. For many sites this is the largest of the four. Nobody publishes it site by site, not us and not anyone else, so it is missing from every figure on this page.
The capacity market. A separate annual auction that pays plant to be there in a shortage. Not counted here yet. The contracts are public so this is a job we can do, not a wall.
Standing ready. It also pays a battery simply to be available to respond, whether or not it is ever called. Public, per site, and counted here. Together these two came to £193.8m.
Buying low and selling high. A battery makes money charging when power is cheap and discharging when it is dear. For many sites this is the largest of the four. Nobody publishes it site by site, not us and not anyone else, so it is missing from every figure on this page.
The capacity market. A separate annual auction that pays plant to be there in a shortage. Not counted here yet. The contracts are public so this is a job we can do, not a wall.
Earnings per kilowatt, from the two public sources
Per kilowatt, so a 20 MW site and a 100 MW site can be compared. None of this is profit. It is income from two of the four routes, before the cost of buying the power, and before anything the site earns from trading.
A handful of sites show a negative figure. That is real rather than a mistake. The auctions to stand ready sometimes clear below zero, and a provider then pays for the right to hold the position.
A handful of sites show a negative figure. That is real rather than a mistake. The auctions to stand ready sometimes clear below zero, and a provider then pays for the right to hold the position.
What the fleet earned from balancing, month by month
Balancing only. Shown as an annual rate per kilowatt so that a part month is not compared with a full one, and part months are drawn paler.
A battery in Scotland charges eleven times as often as it discharges
Every site, ranked by what it earned
Does this cover the whole fleet
Very nearly, and here is the arithmetic rather than a claim.
How we know where each site is
No warranty. Elexon and NESO publish this data as is. Two of the three revenue lines are here: the balancing mechanism and the response and reserve auctions. The third is wholesale trading, and nobody publishes that for individual assets, so no total on this page is an asset's full income. Registered capacity is Elexon's generation capacity field, is not de-rated and says nothing about duration. Live positions are physical notifications, which are a statement of intent published ahead of time, not metered output.