IN Brief:
- Nord Pool is delivering the Clean Horizon Storage Index across European bidding zones.
- The index tracks simulated revenues for one-hour, two-hour, and four-hour BESS assets.
- Standardised benchmarking is becoming more important as merchant battery exposure increases across Europe.
Nord Pool is delivering the Clean Horizon Storage Index across European power markets, adding a standardised benchmark for battery energy storage system revenues in a sector increasingly shaped by merchant exposure, trading strategy, and market design.
The index has been developed with Clean Horizon and is available in daily and monthly formats. It covers simulated revenues for one-hour, two-hour, and four-hour BESS assets across bidding zones in 15 European countries, drawing on revenue opportunities from day-ahead, intraday, and ancillary-service markets.
Battery storage revenues vary sharply between countries and between bidding zones. Market volatility, renewable penetration, balancing requirements, ancillary-service saturation, grid congestion, market-access rules, and dispatch strategy all influence the value an asset can capture. That variability makes independent benchmarking increasingly useful for developers, asset owners, optimisers, lenders, and investors.
The storage market has moved beyond simple capacity announcements. Project value now depends on duration, connection terms, route-to-market agreements, trading algorithms, degradation management, warranty structures, grid-service eligibility, and the ability to move between revenue streams as conditions change. A battery that performs well in one market design may generate weaker returns in another if volatility, ancillary-service depth, or settlement rules differ.
Nord Pool’s role gives the index a strong market-data foundation, while Clean Horizon’s methodology applies storage modelling across defined asset durations. The availability of one-hour, two-hour, and four-hour benchmarks is important because duration is one of the most visible investment questions in the sector. Shorter-duration systems may capture fast cycling and intraday volatility more efficiently, while longer-duration systems can access deeper shifting opportunities where spreads, scarcity events, or service design justify the additional capital cost.
Europe’s co-located renewables and battery pipeline is expanding as curtailment, negative pricing, and grid congestion rise. A revenue index does not solve those physical constraints, but it improves visibility over how different markets reward the flexibility that batteries provide.
That visibility also connects to software-led operation. The development of AI-led battery control platforms reflects a wider move towards automated dispatch, real-time optimisation, and market-aware asset management. Benchmarking and optimisation are linked: the index can show what a representative asset might earn under defined assumptions, while software and trading strategy determine how close an actual asset gets to its available opportunity.
The index also responds to a credibility issue in storage investment. Revenue forecasts can be highly sensitive to assumptions, particularly for merchant assets. Developers may model future volatility differently from lenders, and optimisers may take different views on attainable returns. A neutral benchmark can reduce some of that divergence by giving market participants a shared reference point, even though project-specific modelling will still be needed for investment decisions.
Standardisation becomes more important as storage pipelines expand. Europe is moving from early market formation into a more disciplined deployment phase, where capital is harder to secure without strong evidence around revenue, degradation, equipment performance, and grid access. A benchmark will not remove market risk, but it can make that risk easier to compare between countries, bidding zones, and asset durations.
The next test will be how the index is used in financing, acquisition, optimisation, and portfolio reporting. As more battery assets operate across multiple markets, independent revenue data may become part of the normal commercial infrastructure of storage, alongside technical due diligence, warranties, connection studies, and market-access agreements.
