The economics of storage stopped being a single-product story years ago. Today’s best-performing assets earn from four places at once, and the art is in the sequencing.

1. Frequency regulation

Fast, shallow cycles with premium pricing. Regulation markets reward speed and accuracy — exactly what batteries do best — but saturate quickly, so treat it as the seasoning, not the meal.

2. Capacity payments

Being available when the grid is stressed now earns real money in most organized markets. The catch: you must actually be charged when the call comes, which constrains how aggressively you arbitrage on tight days.

3. Energy arbitrage

Buy the solar belly, sell the evening ramp. Spreads have widened as renewable penetration deepens, and this is now the volume business for most grid-scale fleets.

4. Clipping recapture

On DC-coupled solar sites with high DC-to-AC ratios, energy that would be clipped at the inverter flows into the battery instead — typically adding 4–6% to annual yield at nearly zero marginal cost.

The lesson from our fleet data: co-optimization beats prioritization. An EMS that re-solves the stack every five minutes consistently outearns static schedules by double digits.