Home Batteries Are Missing Europe's Most Volatile Market
Most home batteries in Europe aren't taking part in the volatile intraday power markets. But when grouped together, they can take advantage of these price swings.
European homes are adding more batteries every year. In 2025, German households alone installed about 530,000 new storage systems, according to Battery Charts from RWTH Aachen. Most of these batteries just store solar energy during the day and power the house at night. While this is helpful, home batteries hardly make an impact on Europe's power markets. If they were grouped into coordinated fleets and connected to intraday trading, they could earn money from the market's most volatile prices and help balance the grid as more renewables come online.
Ancillary services are getting crowded
For a long time, battery operators could count on steady income from frequency reserves. However, in many European countries, FCR and aFRR auctions now attract more battery capacity than the grid requires.
Jon Ferris, Head of Flexibility at LCP Delta, told Energy-Storage.News that grid-scale operators are now forced to optimise across several markets at once, including frequency products, reserves, day-ahead, and intraday trading.
Most distributed batteries have not followed this shift. They usually just support self-consumption and, as of mid-2026, do not earn any money from the markets.
Intraday volatility is where the value moved
Intraday prices can change much more than day-ahead prices. For example, a new wind forecast, sudden cold weather, or a plant outage can cause quarter-hourly prices to jump just hours before delivery.
Podero, a residential flexibility trading platform, registered that on one day in October 2025, it saw intraday bids close to €1,000/MWh in some quarter-hours, compared to a €129/MWh day-ahead price.
As more renewables are added, the grid sees more of these price swings. Grouped home batteries are a good fit to take advantage of them. A coordinated fleet of thousands of small systems can quickly adjust charging and discharging, creating positions big enough to make a difference. However, each household's preferences and battery health still set clear limits on what the fleet can do.
More than a revenue play
There are system-wide benefits as well as private ones. After the day-ahead auction closes, a grid with lots of renewables often moves away from its forecasts. Distributed storage that responds during these hours helps reduce the stress of balancing the grid. When you add congestion relief, peak shaving, and voltage support, connecting home batteries to markets also makes sense for the grid.
For energy retailers and utilities, this is also a way to keep customers. If a household's battery earns money on volatile days, people have a reason to stay with their provider and are more likely to trust new smart-energy products.
How does a utility actually get access?
A single 10 kWh battery can't connect to the exchange by itself. There are two practical options. Utilities and retailers with a trading desk can add an orchestration layer and trade the aggregated fleet using their existing exchange access. Those without a trading desk can work with an aggregator or trading firm that offers market access as a service and shares the value. In both cases, the household signs just one contract with a familiar brand.
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FAQ
Can home batteries trade on the intraday market?
Individually, no, they're far too small. Aggregated into a distributed fleet, they can: the aggregator calculates available flexibility across thousands of systems, takes positions in continuous intraday trading and adjusts charging and discharging across the fleet to deliver them, within each household's preferences and battery health limits.
Why is intraday more attractive than frequency reserves now?
FCR and aFRR auctions in several European countries attract more battery capacity than the grids need, so returns are falling. Intraday volatility, driven by weather forecast revisions and outages, keeps growing with renewable shares: on one October 2025 day, trading platform Podero recorded intraday bids approaching €1,000/MWh versus a €129/MWh day-ahead reference. Intraday also needs no TSO prequalification, which reserves do.
What does a utility need to monetise residential storage?
Connectivity to the devices, forecasting of each household's consumption and solar production, an optimisation engine that respects user preferences, and market access, either through its own trading desk or an aggregator partner. An orchestration platform provides this as a layer on top of the existing hardware and EMS.
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