Storage marketing: tolling, floor and profit share compared
If you do not run a battery on the markets yourself, you sign with a marketer. Three patterns keep coming back. The names of the firms do not matter here. What matters is who keeps the revenue and who keeps the risk.
Three patterns, no ranking
Tolling: you hand over capacity for a fixed fee. Market risk sits with the marketer. You trade possible upside for a plannable payment and you give up control.
A floor guarantees a lower bound and shares what sits above it. Downside is limited and part of the volatile revenue stays with you. Profit share has no floor. Revenue is split by a key, and you carry the market result.
What a percentage does not say
A percentage without a defined base is not a term. What matters is what the split refers to, who owes availability, who holds prequalification, how calls are settled and how the contract ends.
The same asset can sit below a fixed tolling fee in a quiet year and above it in a volatile one. Which pattern fits follows from the capital structure and from who wants to own the dispatch. I do not offer an industry formula.
Multi-use stays sequential
The contract does not change the physics. In each window a battery stays with one job: holding capacity, arbitrage or peak shaving. The marketer picks the window. Markets are not added.
Balancing products still require a 1 MW minimum bid under decision BK6-21-042 of 28 April 2022. Below that, a pool is needed. The marketer runs the pool, not me.
In the same context
No recommendation of a marketer and no revenue guarantee. The contract text prevails.
Common questions
Which model is best?
None in general. Tolling trades upside for a fixed fee, a floor shares above a bound, profit share splits the whole result. The fit depends on who can carry market risk.
Do you name marketers?
Not on this page. A ranking would be a comparison without criteria that can be checked. In a mandate, one draft contract can be read against the points above.
Do FCR, aFRR and arbitrage add up?
No. A battery serves one job per window. Mixed revenue is the mix across the windows of a year, not the sum of the separate markets.