Method note · scenario
The perfect-foresight arbitrage bound
What it measures
An upper bound on what a battery could earn by charging in the cheapest hours and discharging in the dearest (arbitrage), with tomorrow's prices known.
Inputs
- The day-ahead price on the canonical hourly grid, for the bidding zone selected on the view
- The battery's power, duration and round-trip efficiency, stated on the view
Method and weighting
The shared rule: the battery charges in the cheapest hours of its stated duration and discharges in the dearest hours, as if tomorrow's prices were already known, with no effect on the price it trades against.
On the Spread view, that rule is applied to every day of the window and the results are summed, expressed per megawatt of battery power.
On the Storage view, the rule is applied once, to a single representative day built from the mean price of each hour of the day over the window. The round-trip efficiency is the share of what the battery stores that comes back out when it discharges.
Window
The rolling 12 months to the last complete day, refreshed on the 1st and 15th of each month. The current window runs from to . Data last refreshed on .
Known limits
- This is an upper bound: it assumes tomorrow's prices are known before the battery decides when to trade. Real batteries earn less.
- It leaves out the effect the battery's own charging and discharging would have on the price it trades against.
- The Spread figure sums every day of the window assuming no losses; the Storage figure represents one day built from the window's mean hourly price at the round-trip efficiency stated on that view. The two figures differ for that reason, and each view labels which one it shows.
Used on
Sources: ENTSO-E. Each is described on the Data sources page.