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8 min Reading time Zonnefabriek has something new on offer: the possibility to use your home battery for trading on the electricity market. We do this in collaboration with energy supplier Frank Energie. We install the SunPower home battery at your home and let it get controlled via the internet. The battery charges and discharges at times when it yields the most money. You can keep track of your earnings every day via the Frank Energie app.
With an energy contract from Frank Energie you can trade on the imbalance market
You contact Zonnefabriek and speak to one of our advisors (completely no-strings-attached, of course: such a conversation does not oblige you to anything!). If, after the chat, you think it's a good idea, you order the home battery through us. You then get a dynamic energy contract with Frank Energie (note: this is done via a special Zonnefabriek page on their website).
As soon as that is taken care of, we will inform SunPower that the home battery at your home may be controlled by Frank Energie from that moment on. This control is done via the internet: the Sunpower battery is connected to the internet via the router and receives orders to charge or discharge.
The control is based on the markets. Frank Energie monitors both the market for dynamic rates and the market for trading in imbalance compensation. Depending on what yields the most money at that moment, your home battery and those of hundreds of other customers are put to use.
Frank Energie has an app for your phone, on which you can see how much money you have earned with your battery daily. The money you earn is paid out to you in two ways: what you earn on the spot market for electricity is returned to you via your energy bill; what you earn on the imbalance market is returned to you once a quarter via a credit invoice from Frank Energie.
When choosing a battery size, consider the future after net metering: too large is pointless
For trading with a home battery, now is the best time to jump in. Because thanks to the system of net metering, we can send electricity in and out of the home without loss. In two years, the net metering system will expire and then the situation will change: at that point, feeding power back into the grid will become less interesting. From then on, we will mainly use the battery to store self-generated solar power, and to store cheap power from the grid at night to use later in the day.
This means that if you purchase a home battery now, you can quickly earn back a large part of the purchase costs in the next two years. And then you will already have a nice home battery with which you can protect yourself against the consequences of the abolition of the net metering mechanism: smart and future-proof!
SunPower home batteries are solid and safe with a long lifespan: you are guaranteed of 10 years trouble-free operation and they will probably even last longer than 15 years. What is very important when purchasing is that you choose a battery that is adapted to the situation after 2027. That means don't choose the largest possible storage capacity, but think about how much you will actually need later. A battery that is too large is nice for now, but may turn out to be unnecessarily expensive later.
We can imagine that you have some questions about this new offer. That is why we have already noted some questions and answers here. For more information, you can of course contact us, we would be happy to hear from you! We will supplement the list below with questions that we receive from you.
No, certainly not. The battery you buy is entirely yours and you can cancel the energy contract with Frank Energie at any time. If you want to use the battery to increase your self-consumption or to provide emergency power, without trading on any market, then that is entirely up to you. Just like with the solar panels, Zonnefabriek provides assistance with technical issues and any warranty claims.
Sunpower offers a 10-year product warranty on the battery and the associated inverter. In addition, there is a performance warranty on the batteries that also lasts 10 years. The performance warranty stipulates that the storage capacity of the batteries is still at least 70% of the original capacity after 10 years. See also the warranty conditions.
It is difficult to predict exactly how much money trading on the imbalance market will yield in the future: the value of the power offered on the market depends on the unpredictable deviation of supply and demand of electricity compared to expectations. We can only look at the past and make assumptions about the future based on that. According to Frank Energie, with a battery of 12 kWh and a capacity of 10 kW you could count on approximately €2,134,= yield per year. See also the Frank Energie website.
When trading on the dynamic tariff market, it is clear a day in advance what the prices will be. This allows you to know exactly when it will be interesting to store energy from the grid (when the price is low) and when you want to sell energy to it (when the price is high). The prices are based on expected supply and demand of energy.
Trading in imbalance works differently: all parties that trade on the energy market supply a so-called ‘e-program’ to TenneT (the transmission grid operator) every day with the expected consumption and feed-in of electricity for the following day in 5-minute periods. If reality deviates from the forecast, TenneT must immediately bring everything back into balance with its own production and consumption. This costs TenneT money, so the parties must then pay a fee to TenneT. The higher the deviation, the higher the fee. Parties can reduce this fee by quickly deploying batteries, such as yours. In this way, the available battery capacity is constantly sold to the highest bidder.
Trading in the imbalance market is inherently unpredictable: at any moment, it can suddenly become worthwhile to push power into or out of the system. It turns out that trading on the imbalance market currently makes significantly more money than trading in the dynamic rate market.
