One of the first and most important decisions you’ll make as a battery developer is where to put the goddamn thing. A major driver behind this decision is network costs (especially demand charges). In this post, we will cover the basics for you because we’re just such lovely people.

Welcome to Electricity Retailing, the cutthroat game to see who can run the gauntlet and come out on top! Think you’ve got what it takes? You’re not alone, but there have been many past players who’ve tried and failed.

The lure of playing Electricity Retailing is strong. Particularly for those who have never played before, the potential pay-off seems to outweigh the complexity.

Like many NEM mechanisms, the WDRM is imperfect and there are layers of complexity. In this post, we’ll help you better understand the WDRM and work out whether it’s something you should be pursuing over other forms of wholesale market access. This will mostly be of interest to Unscheduled BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) project developers and owner-operators but, as always, there’s something in it for everyone.

In this post, we’ll look at what drives value in FCAS markets. We’ll examine supply and demand, identify drivers of high FCAS prices, and bust some pesky myths about FCAS market value. There’s an infuriating amount of downright disingenuous ‘advice’ out there leading people to think that FCAS is the game-changer that’ll deliver your much-desired <5-year BESS ROI. We’re here to pour cold water on that idea, using the time-honoured combination of FACTS and LOGIC.

Do you know your VF-FCAS from your F-FCAS? Do you know that it’s pronounced “eff-cass” and not “fucass”? Do you even care? Does anything matter anymore? In this post, we’ll cover the basics of frequency control in the NEM with a focus on unscheduled batteries. We’ll throw in some regulatory history too, for the dedicated fan(s).

Wholesale (a.k.a. spot) market arbitrage is just one service in the stack, but is arguably the most profitable and the most crucial to get right. In this post, we’ll explain the regulatory arrangements that underpin how an unscheduled BESS operator can access the spot market.

We are excited to share the successful closing of our pre-seed funding round led by Twynam Funds Management!

OK, so you’ve looked at the market, and you see a couple of others talking about their optimisation products too. Why is Hachiko different?

You may have heard about scheduled lite or voluntarily scheduled resources in recent energy market announcements. In this post, we’ll explain what scheduled lite is, and what it means for owner-operators of non-scheduled BESS portfolios.

Optimiser this, optimiser that - you hear it everywhere when batteries are mentioned. But why is an optimiser important? What even is optimisation? We will look to answer these questions below, using Australia’s NEM (National Electricity Market) as our area of focus.

Many people have asked why our business is called Hachiko. There is a bit of a story behind this, so I thought it’d be worth writing an explanation for those curious creatures among you.