How meteocontrol delivers bankable BESS revenue assessments with Gridcog

“Without a tool like Gridcog we wouldn’t be able to offer our BESS revenue assessment service. It matches the complexity of the projects our customers face.”

Explore how meteocontrol - a long-standing leader in monitoring and technical consulting for solar and battery assets - uses Gridcog to deliver bankable BESS revenue assessments for utility-scale projects across Germany and beyond.

meteocontrol has been a fixture of the European solar industry for around three decades, and is widely regarded as a market leader in monitoring and control software for PV and battery energy storage systems (BESS). Today the business operates two main units: the larger software unit, which monitors and controls many gigawatts of PV and BESS assets worldwide, and a more specialised advisory unit that supports projects across the full lifecycle - from feasibility and techno-economical expert opinions through to on-site services.

It is the technical consulting team that has partnered with Gridcog. Their core market is Germany, but in the past 20 years they have delivered projects in around 55 countries.

The team focus is on bankable techno-economic analysis for utility-scale BESS and hybrid projects.

Peik Uhr, Senior Business Development Manager for Technical Consulting at meteocontrol, leads market development and the build-out of new advisory services. With almost a decade in the German energy sector - spanning engineering consultancy at Fichtner and high-growth roles at Enpal and 1KOMMA5° - Peik has watched the BESS market shift from niche to mainstream.

“Due to rapid market development, PV projects without BESS are essentially no longer being built in Germany,” Peik explains. “Storage has become a mandatory component for any project that wants a credible route to market.”

The challenge: building a bankable BESS revenue assessment service from scratch

About a year ago, meteocontrol began to see clear signals from the market that their customers - solar developers, asset managers, regional banks and investors - needed help answering two questions on every new BESS or co-located project: what is the optimal sizing, and what revenues can it credibly earn?

The team’s existing toolkit, mostly built in Excel, could simulate the physical and capacity behaviour of a battery - useful for things like reducing curtailment losses - but couldn’t come close to representing a market-exposed business case with stacked revenues, ancillary services and dynamic price curves.

“The pain point was simple - there was demand we couldn’t meet. The modelling problem was too complex to handle internally, and we hadn’t validated the product-market fit enough to commit to building our own software.”

Buying capability rather than building it internally was the pragmatic answer. After testing several alternatives - and quickly ruling out tools that proved too opaque, too simplistic, or lacking real industry support - the team selected Gridcog.

“Communication from Gridcog was open, pragmatic and engaged from the very beginning,” Peik says. “The product delivered what was promised, the features we needed were all there, and it offered the best value for money of anything we evaluated.”

How Gridcog underpins meteocontrol’s BESS revenue assessment product

Gridcog now sits at the heart of meteocontrol’s BESS revenue assessment service - a bankable techno-economic deliverable that gives investors and lenders the confidence to commit. Three to four BESS specialists in the consulting team use Gridcog as their primary modelling environment, working through multiple new projects every week.

One platform, many project archetypes

Peik points to the breadth of project structures the team can now model credibly within a single tool:

• Standalone BESS, or co-location with PV, wind or a consumer load profile
• “Green” and “grey” electricity setups, including grid charging rights
• Revenue stacks combining wholesale market trading, ancillary and balancing services, and fixed revenues such as tolls or floors
• Either a fixed project size or fully open-ended sizing optimisation
• Back-testing against historical price curves, and forecasting against future scenarios

“Gridcog matches the complexity of the projects our customers face. That’s the test we set, and it passed.”

Inside three recent projects

Three recent meteocontrol projects illustrate the variety of work the team is delivering with Gridcog.

Saxony-Anhalt: 53 MWp PV + 120 MWh BESS, two-stage build

A co-located project in Saxony-Anhalt combined a 53 MWp PV plant with a 120 MWh grey-storage battery behind a fixed grid connection permit. The customer needed an answer to two questions: what is the optimal storage size for the planned site, and what is the realistic revenue stack across fixed and fully merchant streams?

A particular wrinkle: the project is being delivered in two construction phases over time. meteocontrol modelled both phases inside Gridcog, evaluating multiple storage capacities against the planned PV capacity to find the most economically viable configuration for each stage of the build.

Schleswig-Holstein: scenario analysis across four configurations

For a co-located project in Schleswig-Holstein, the brief was a structured scenario analysis. The team modelled four combinations of PV plus battery storage — two different storage capacities, each evaluated as a green and as a grey electricity system — alongside a PV-standalone case for reference. Gridcog’s optimiser tested the price signals from each market and traded into the highest-return option in every interval, giving the customer a clear, like-for-like comparison.

Unterallgäu, Bavaria: revenue assessment as a foundation for mortgage value

A 10 MWp PV plus 10 MWh BESS project in Unterallgäu took the work one step further. The Gridcog revenue assessment was used as a key input into a comprehensive capital value and mortgage value assessment for project financing — exactly the kind of bankable, defensible analysis that lenders now expect for a co-located asset.

Working with Gridcog’s industry team

Beyond the platform itself, Peik singles out the Gridcog industry team as a key part of the value meteocontrol gets from the partnership.

“Support has been very good — supportive, open and proactive. We have regular check-ins, and the chat function gives us reliable, on-demand help when we need it. Reachability has been consistently high.”

That close, responsive collaboration has mattered as the team has built up their service offer and as German market rules have continued to evolve.

Why meteocontrol chose Gridcog

Asked to summarise the choice, Peik comes back to four things: open, pragmatic communication; a product that does what it says on the tin; a feature set that fully covers the work the team needs to do; and best-in-class value for money.

“Without Gridcog we wouldn’t be able to offer our BESS revenue assessment service at all — at least not as a bankable, market-exposed product.”

Looking ahead: from business cases to project execution

The German market is moving quickly. Today, most of meteocontrol’s engagements are focused on business cases and revenue models for new BESS developments. Peik expects that mix to broaden as more projects move into execution.

“The dynamics around BESS business cases and revenue streams are constantly evolving,” he says. “We follow them closely and integrate new revenue models, risk-mitigation approaches and bankability requirements directly into our assessment, so customers can show investors a realistic view of the maximum revenue potential of their BESS.”

As more projects break ground, meteocontrol expects rising demand for downstream advisory services such as technical inspections, technical due diligence and noise assessments - the next phase of work as today’s investment decisions become tomorrow’s operating assets. The team is also trialling Gridcog for repowering of existing PV systems, a potential new standalone service line - and anticipates a clear rise in BESS retrofit work as grid connection permits become increasingly scarce.

Reflections on success

For meteocontrol, Gridcog has done more than upgrade a modelling workflow. It has unlocked an entirely new advisory product - one that helps developers, asset managers and lenders make confident, well-evidenced decisions on the next wave of utility-scale BESS investment in Europe.

If you’re a technical consultancy or advisory team looking to deliver bankable BESS and hybrid project assessments faster, reach out to our industry experts today.

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meteocontrol: https://www.meteocontrol.com/

Peik Uhr (LinkedIn): www.linkedin.com/in/peik-uhr