Maximizing Battery Storage Profits via High-Frequency Intraday Trading

Why publish the strategy? Academic vs. commercial incentives

• Commenters note that the strategy requires owning/controlling physical batteries on the grid; it’s not a paper-only algorithm.
• Academic teams are often publicly funded and rewarded more for publications than for quietly monetizing strategies.
• Many published “profitable” strategies in finance either don’t survive trading costs/constraints, have worse risk‑adjusted returns than simpler methods, or stop working once adopted.
• Taking a strategy to a hedge fund as an outsider is slow and uncertain; industry already runs similar optimizations in opaque ways.

Practical constraints of battery trading

• Batteries are capital-intensive, degrade with cycling, have nontrivial inefficiencies, and can’t charge and discharge simultaneously.
• Real deployment needs forecasting, market access, SCADA, compliance, security, and physical grid participation, not just code.
• Most real systems optimize across multiple markets (day-ahead, intraday, reserves) with complex boundary conditions.

Negative prices, arbitrage, and “dummy loads”

• Negative prices arise from oversupply and rigid or subsidized generation; arbitrage with batteries can profit from taking power at strongly negative prices and later selling at less-negative or positive prices.
• Some suggest modifying BESS or adding explicit “dummy loads” (resistive heaters, load banks) to be paid to waste power; others argue this is thermally hard at scale, accelerates battery wear, and treats a symptom of market design problems.
• There’s extensive debate over whether negative prices should be rare “penalties” for inflexible generators or are becoming common with renewables.

Distributed storage: homes, EVs, and virtual power plants

• Residential tariffs with dynamic/spot pricing plus home batteries already perform arbitrage and participate via aggregators/“virtual power plants.”
• Bi-directional EV charging and “prices to devices” have been discussed and piloted for years; barriers are regulatory, technical, and user concerns over degradation and reliability.
• Many argue EVs and second‑life car batteries could provide huge aggregate storage; others worry about control, cybersecurity, and user trust.

“Use excess energy for X” vs. capital economics

• Frequent proposals: desalination, carbon capture, hydrogen, crypto, AI training, district heating/cooling.
• Pushback: these uses are capital-intensive and need high utilization; short, sporadic negative-price windows rarely justify the investment.
• Consensus in the thread: the cheapest, most scalable response is more storage, smarter loads, and better market design; exotic “free energy” uses are usually uneconomic.