Understanding NESO’s Quick Reserve: A Guide for Energy Developers

In July 2025, Positive and Negative Quick Reserve cleared at their lowest levels on average since the service launched in December 2024 - £5 and £4.30/MW/h respectively - down from £10 and £7 in February.

What is Quick Reserve and how does it work?

Quick Reserve is a NESO ancillary service that helps the control room balance electricity supply and demand. As opposed to other ancillary services like the dynamic suite, activation is not directly linked to frequency but rather manually dispatched by the System Operator. 

How bids and payments are structured

The day is split into 30-minute periods, and participants can submit bids a day in advance to be available during these periods. If accepted, your asset must be ready to increase or decrease generation based on instructions from NESO, in return for an availability payment. 

The energy physically delivered is then paid at pay-as-bid price, so lower-priced bids are prioritized. However, because of the prior availability contract, pricing energy too high can result in penalties. 

Why Quick Reserve matters for the energy system

While NESO also has access to many other assets via the Balancing Mechanism, contracting through Quick Reserve ensures capacity is lined up in advance and is designed to minimise price spikes. In some ways this service is very similar to aFRR in Europe.

So now for the key question, how lucrative is this service?

Let’s spin up a model in Gridcog to check it out.

Setting up Quick Reserve in Gridcog

First of all, let’s see how Quick Reserve is set up in the library. The main components are both the availability and activation payments for Positive and Negative Quick Reserve. Next, notice that we’ve input offers accepted and energy utilisation percentages for each direction. These values are benchmarked from NESO’s auction results and reflect the fact that your asset doesn’t always win the bid, but also doesn’t always get activated. Finally, we set the Trading block duration to be interval level - so 30 minutes, which is different from the Dx suite’s 4 hour blocks.

Happy with this configuration, we can switch to the designer. We’re simulating a single 50MW, 2-hour battery, exposed to all other markets, on top of quick reserve.

Let’s take a look at the results.

Revenue contribution from Quick Reserve

What’s interesting is the share of Quick Reserve in the revenue stack. By splitting cashflows by item, we can look at the revenue from this specific service - broken down into availability and activation payments.

In this 1h BESS simulation, we find that Quick Reserve makes up 25% of all cashflows since December 2024. Splitting by month, we can see in better granularity and note that QR revenue decreases in the most recent months.

Comparing model results with real-world NESO data‍

This trend reflects actual asset data, which we can see on this graph. Taken from NESO auction data, this data shows the average £/MW real battery assets have earned in each ancillary product - and we observe this same declining trend.

How trading strategies are evolving

This means trading strategies have shifted. While early on, battery operators like Statkraft committed most of their battery capacities to QR, riding the first wave, now it's blended in more with other services to become part of the stack. Today Quick Reserve still forms a non-negligible component of the value stack alongside other trading opportunities.

The role of Gridcog in stacking services

This is where Gridcog excels - by reflecting market rules such as trading block durations and offers accepted percentage, even allowing for future rates to reflect increased saturation as time goes, Gridcog allows users to stack services and visualise how they interact to inform a winning strategy, and pull out reliable forecast revenues.

Get in touch if you'd like to find out more.

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