Observable gross value
$7116993 months public energy + gross FCASNEM Dashboard · battery dispatch
ChargeTrace
Australia's grid battery explorer
See when a grid-scale battery charges, discharges, holds energy and enables frequency services. The financial view is an estimated observable gross market value from public energy and FCAS data. It is not settled revenue or profit.
NEM Dashboard projectPublic AEMO dataWeekly refresh
Project thesis · What ChargeTrace is testingRead the 200-word thesis
Batteries are becoming the NEM's marginal intraday balancing technology. They do not create energy; they move it through time, absorb surplus supply, respond to frequency deviations and preserve scarce capacity for periods when the system values flexibility most. As more batteries connect, their collective behaviour increasingly shapes the prices from which they earn revenue.
ChargeTrace tests how that transition appears in public evidence. It reconstructs what selected batteries did at five-minute resolution, estimates the observable value of energy and FCAS enablement, and compares actual operation with a transparent, price-only hindsight benchmark. The purpose is not to estimate participant profit. Private contracts, degradation costs, network obligations, losses and trading intent remain outside the public dataset.
The central commercial question is whether growing battery volume creates more value or competes it away. More capacity can shift more renewable energy, reduce extreme prices and strengthen the grid, while simultaneously compressing arbitrage spreads and ancillary-service prices. ChargeTrace therefore treats dispatch, stored energy, market value and fleet growth as one connected story. Refreshed weekly, it is an independent research and post-trade intelligence view—not a live operational terminal—and every estimate retains a visible method and boundary.
Weekly data refreshRuns Mondays at 09:00 Australia/SydneyCurrently published through 9 August 2026Not live data
3 Months view
3 months to 9 August 2026
- Observable gross value
- $711699
- Discharged energy
- 14452 MWh
- Equivalent cycles
- 30.75
- Highest-value day
- Wed 8 Jul · $71700
Available-history view: this range contains 40 of 91 calendar days (44%). Values are not scaled to a full period or extrapolated.
Energy market value
$691638$1503127 discharge valueGross FCAS value
$20061ten public enablement servicesOpportunity captured
16%versus feasible price-only hindsightPeriod operation
How the battery operated
Discharged MWhCharged MWhObservable valueEnergy valueFCAS valueCycles
Week shows daily observations. Three Months groups the period into weeks. Switch between physical energy flow and the observable energy–FCAS value mix.
Opportunity capture
Actual energy value versus feasible hindsight
Actual energy valueHindsight benchmarkAt or above referenceBelow reference
The benchmark respects public power and storage limits, observed daily start and end storage, five-minute dispatch and 90% round-trip efficiency. Use Dollar value for scale or Capture rate to compare efficiency through time.
Actual energy value$691638
Feasible hindsight value$4353746
Public-data capture ratio16%
Benchmark coverage40 of 40 days
How to interpret the benchmark
A ratio below 100% is not evidence of a trading mistake. The asset may have reserved headroom for FCAS, followed a network or contract obligation, managed degradation, encountered an outage or acted on information unavailable to this model. Treat it as a repeatable research comparator, not lost profit.
Cycling pattern
3 Months operating rhythm
Equivalent cycles use discharged MWh divided by public storage capacity. Three-month cells are weekly totals.
Value stack
Where observable value came from
$711699gross estimate
- Energy market
- $691638
- Gross FCAS
- $20061
- Charging cost
- $811489
- Value / discharged MWh
- $49
3 Months comparison
How the cohort compared
Absolute value rewards scale. Value per discharged MWh and cycles make unlike batteries more comparable across the selected range.
Five-minute day inspector · 9 August 2026Open detailed dispatch, storage and opportunity charts
288 five-minute unit records across 1 registration · 288 SCADA readings · 288 storage readingsComplete
Power and price
What the battery did
SCADA output in MW. Positive is export; negative is grid charging. Price uses the regional five-minute RRP.
Stored energy
AEMO-published energy storage
49 MWh low309 MWh high
AEMO's dispatch energy-storage series, not a battery-management-system measurement. The dashed line is public nameplate storage capacity.
Daily opportunity
Actual dispatch versus the hindsight schedule
Actual energy value$15474
Feasible hindsight value$64865
Capture ratio24%
Storage boundary50 → 51 MWh
Daily FCAS service detail
- Raise 6 second
- $14
- Raise regulation
- $770
- Lower regulation
- $318
Fleet coverage
Where ChargeTrace sits in the NEM battery fleet
73%of strictly in-service registered MW
Coverage is measured against AEMO's July 2026 Generation Information register: 4317 MW / 9220 MWh published in ChargeTrace, from a strict in-service fleet of 5947 MW / 12384 MWh. Commissioning assets are excluded.
Fleet snapshot: AEMO Generation Information, 31 July 2026. The state-tile map is schematic and not to geographic scale.
Growth versus cannibalisation
More battery activity, thinner captured spreads
Average NEM battery discharge has more than doubled since Q3 2025, but the fleet's captured price spread and estimated quarterly market revenue have not risen with it.
Q2 2026: average discharge reached 476 MW while the fleet spread fell to $51/MWh and estimated energy-plus-FCAS revenue fell to $57.5 million.
Source: AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics, Q3 2025 to Q2 2026.
Method and boundary
Useful operational evidence, not participant profit
Energy integrates signed SCADA output over five minutes and applies regional RRP. Transmission loss factors, fees, hedges and settlement metering are excluded.
FCAS is enabled MW × service price ÷ 12 across ten Raise and Lower services.
Storage uses AEMO's initial and projected BDU energy-storage fields. Values above public nameplate remain visible and flagged.
Freshness uses AEMO next-day files and refreshes Mondays at 09:00 Australia/Sydney, normally through the latest common complete source date available at that weekly run. It is not live.
Source: AEMO NEMWeb Next Day Dispatch, DispatchIS and Dispatch SCADA. Last local refresh completed 11 Aug 2026 12:37 · data through 9 Aug 2026.