Schedule batteries in Italy before the day-ahead auction

To schedule a battery for the next day, an operator must commit the plan before the 12:00 auction. The daily gap between the highest and the lowest price averages EUR 77/MWh in the North and up to EUR 101/MWh in Sicily. The forecast determines how much of this spread the battery earns.

The case covers seven price zones. Each zone has its own price, so each battery receives the forecast for its zone.

To compare forecasts on equal terms, the backtest schedules one 100 MW / 400 MWh battery on each forecast. The battery has 85% round-trip efficiency, one cycle per day, and a degradation cost of EUR 10/MWh.

The comparison includes a naive schedule that repeats the previous day and three rival foundation models that read price history only. The free public forecasts are the demand, wind, and solar forecasts published by Terna, which a gradient-boosting model converts into a price forecast.

eomer Expert adds three agents to the eomer forecasting model. Site Agent forecasts the output of the largest solar and wind plants, Grid Agent reads the published system forecasts, and Border Agent reads interconnector capacities and neighbouring markets.

eomer Expert captures 88% of the perfect-foresight profit, compared with 85% for the free public forecasts and 84% for the most profitable rival model. eomer Expert earns the most in all seven zones and in 10 of 11 months.

The 80% uncertainty interval of eomer Expert contains 75% of outcomes, compared with 57% for the public-forecast benchmark. Relative to the naive schedule, eomer Expert adds EUR 897k per battery-year.

The schedule settles at the day-ahead price without intraday updates, so the estimate excludes intraday trading and balancing markets. A deployment must add the constraints and the market access of the actual asset.