Day-ahead prices were negative in 573 of 8,760 hours in 2025, up from 457 in 2024, and averaged €89.32/MWh.
Battery developers requested 573.5 GW of grid connections in 2025; network operators committed 54.2 GW, including earlier requests.
About 3.8 GWh of large-scale battery storage was added in the first nine months of 2026, up around 350% year on year.
In a Gridcog model, MiSpeL lifted a 10 MW / 2-hour battery and 10 MWac solar site’s annual revenue from €1.70m as a green battery to €2.33m.
How the market is set up
How is the German electricity market set up?
As a single price zone with a fragmented grid underneath. Germany and Luxembourg form one bidding zone (DE-LU), so there is one wholesale price for the whole country in each delivery period. Congestion inside the zone is managed after the market clears, through redispatch, rather than by zonal prices.
| Role | Who | What it means for projects |
|---|---|---|
01Bidding zone | Germany and Luxembourg (DE-LU) | One day-ahead price for the whole zone |
02Transmission system operators (TSOs) | 50Hertz (north-east and east), Amprion (west), TenneT (north to Bavaria) and TransnetBW (Baden-Württemberg) | Each balances its own control area; balancing services are bought jointly on regelleistung.net |
03Distribution system operators (DSOs) | More than 800, mostly municipal utilities (Stadtwerke) | Grid fees, connection costs and flexible connection terms vary from one DSO to the next |
04Regulator | Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency) | Sets market and grid fee rules, and issued MiSpeL |
05Power exchanges | EPEX SPOT and Nord Pool (spot), EEX (futures) and EXAA (early day-ahead auction) | Day-ahead and intraday trading is coupled with the rest of Europe |
How does Germany compare with GB?
In March 2025, Laura Hoffmann-Ostenhof likened Germany’s utility-scale battery market to where GB was five years earlier, before GB’s market reached a high level of saturation and maturity. The two markets also share a lot of ideas under different names.
| Germany | Great Britain | |
|---|---|---|
| Price zones | One, shared with Luxembourg | One |
| Settlement period | 15 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Frequency services | FCR, aFRR and mFRR, plus an inertia market from January 2026 | Dynamic Containment, Moderation and Regulation, plus the Balancing Mechanism |
| Capacity market | First auction held in September 2026 under the StromVKG | Running since 2014 |
| Flexible grid access | Flexible Connection Agreements (FCAs) | Active network management (ANM) |
| Renewable support | EEG market premium and innovation tenders | Contracts for Difference (CfDs) |
Modelled in Gridcog
How do green, merchant and MiSpeL strategies compare?
MiSpeL earned the most in Daria Ekimova’s model: about €630k a year more than a green battery. She ran a 10 MW / 2-hour battery co-located with a 12 MWp DC (10 MWac) solar plant in Gridcog, on market prices from September 2025 to September 2026 and a €60/MWh EEG subsidy, under three operating strategies.
MiSpeL kept the EEG premium on energy that came from the solar plant while adding grid-charged arbitrage. The battery works harder than in the green case, with more cycling through the low-yield winter months.
Daria EkimovaSenior Energy Analyst
Annual revenue
Green
€1.70m
Total
- Wholesale
- €1.37m
- Ancillary services
- €0.19m
- EEG premium
- €0.14m
Merchant
€2.25m
Total
- Wholesale
- €1.71m
- Ancillary services
- €0.54m
MiSpeL
€2.33m
Total
- Wholesale
- €1.69m
- Ancillary services
- €0.51m
- EEG premium
- €0.13m
How much can storage protect a solar plant from curtailment?
Most of it, in Daria’s model of a 100 MW solar plant in southern Germany. She built three 2025 curtailment schedules from solar generation profiles and historical redispatch data, and ran them on the solar plant alone and with a co-located green battery.
Standalone, curtailment cut wholesale revenue by up to 35%. With the battery, even without an import connection, revenue losses were limited to a maximum of 6% against the uncurtailed baseline.
Curtailment schedule
High
About30%
Of solar generation lost
- Curtailed hours
- 1,160
Medium
About23%
Of solar generation lost
- Curtailed hours
- 884
Low
About16%
Of solar generation lost
- Curtailed hours
- 669
Do flexible connection terms add up?
Laura Hoffmann-OstenhofCentral Europe Industry Lead
Not simply. Comparing a standalone battery with a co-located battery and solar project under an example FCA, Laura found that stacking several FCA terms often costs less revenue than adding up the impact of each term, because the terms tend to bite in the same hours. Co-location reduced the impact further, as the battery soaked up solar that would otherwise have been constrained.
Weighing up green, grey or MiSpeL for a German site?
Model your project in GridcogHow Gridcog models Germany
How does Gridcog model the German electricity market?
Asset by asset and rule by rule. Gridcog simulates how a German project trades, charges and gets paid, with the market, subsidy and grid rules that apply to it, then runs the cashflows, IRR and NPV for each scenario.
Day-ahead, intraday auction and continuous intraday markets, with churn settings for virtual trading between them.
Balancing services set up in four-hour blocks, with FCR treated as a contingency service and aFRR as a regulation service that moves the battery’s state of charge.
The EEG market premium modelled as an offtake contract against the solar market value, with negative-price rules set to the plant’s commissioning year.
Separate prices for direct solar export, solar exported through the battery and grid-to-grid battery trading, so green, merchant and MiSpeL strategies can be compared side by side.
Import and export limits by season, day and hour, event-based constraints, and the Baukostenzuschuss as a capex item that can be discounted under an FCA.
DSO and TSO capacity and energy charges, including the 2,500-hour rule that sets which price sheet applies, and atypical network use (atypische Netznutzung), where moving a site’s peak outside the operator’s peak windows cuts the capacity charge for the year.
Customers
Who uses Gridcog for German projects?
Developers, EPCs and technical advisers modelling batteries and hybrid projects for banks and investors.
SUNCATCHER Engineering
EPC and part of a developer and IPP group, Germany and Poland
Gridcog analysis helped get a 55 MWh green battery, co-located with an operating solar plant, under way despite financing doubts, with installation scheduled around mid-2026. In a single month, the team modelled seven utility-scale projects in Gridcog.
‘Thanks to Gridcog, we now have a very clear understanding of which PV plant sizes are cost-effective and under which conditions batteries actually add investor value.’
Lucas Dziadek, Project Manager meteocontrol
Monitoring and technical consulting for solar and battery assets, with Germany as its core market
Its consulting team uses Gridcog for bankable BESS revenue assessments, including a 53 MWp solar and 120 MWh battery project in Saxony-Anhalt and a 10 MWp and 10 MWh project in Bavaria whose assessment fed a mortgage value for financing.
‘Without a tool like Gridcog we wouldn’t be able to offer our BESS revenue assessment service.’
Peik Uhr, Senior Business Development Manager, Technical Consulting
Experts
Who are Gridcog’s German market experts?
Gridcog opened a Berlin office in early 2026, and its Industry team works with German clients on local rules and project detail.
Laura Hoffmann-Ostenhof
Central Europe Industry Lead
Before Gridcog, she worked in strategy consulting at Apricum, a cleantech advisory, and in energy consulting in Germany and the UK. Ask her about co-location models for storage and flexible connections in Germany.
Daria Ekimova
Senior Energy Analyst, Berlin
Helps clients model complex projects in Germany and other European markets. Before Gridcog, she was at 1KOMMA5, a German electrification company focused on home energy solutions.
Manuel Baumhof
Senior Energy Associate, Berlin
Helps clients navigate electricity markets, policy and technology in Gridcog, with a background in energy storage systems.
Genna Boyle
CCO and Head of EMEA
Began her career in energy trading at Contact Energy in New Zealand, then helped set up the trading team at Limejump and went on to lead its commercial team.
Request a live demo
Model your German project in Gridcog
Request a demo and we’ll show you how Gridcog models your battery or hybrid project in Germany, from MiSpeL and flexible connections to grid fees and balancing markets.
The team behind Gridcog
Fabian Le Gay Brereton
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
Previously co-founded Greensense, acquired by ERM Power (now Shell Energy).
Pete Tickler
Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder
Co-founded Greensense and led digital innovation at ERM Power (now Shell Energy).
Genna Boyle
Chief Commercial Officer & Head of EMEA
More than 10 years in energy strategy, trading and renewables, with senior roles at Battery Optimiser and Limejump.
.png)
