Turn the Day-Ahead Price Profile into a Dispatch Schedule
WattNext plans the dispatch of your PV and battery portfolio at least 24 hours ahead and keeps the plan up to date throughout the day, against day-ahead market prices. Your battery earns more, and surplus generation goes into storage rather than onto the market at a negative price.
A Fixed Schedule Cannot Read the Price Curve
A battery on a fixed schedule charges and discharges at set times, whatever electricity costs at that moment. Profitable intervals pass unused. The same blind spot shows up on the export side. To stay safely under the export limit, operators curtail PV output rather than risk breaching it, even when that energy could have gone into the battery or into consumption on site. Every 15-minute interval of the next day carries its own price and calls for its own decision.
What Is WattNext?
WattNext is a predictive control engine for portfolios of PV plants with battery storage, integrated into your Energy Management System (EMS). It keeps a rolling energy dispatch plan covering at least the next 24 hours at any moment.
The plan covers every 15-minute interval of that window: how much energy to sell or buy, and how to charge and discharge the battery, within the physical and contractual limits of your assets.
How WattNext Helps
Shorten the Payback Period
Coordinating generation, battery, and flexible load against prices and limits turns idle capacity into revenue, so the investment returns sooner.
Put Every Kilowatt-Hour to Use
Surplus generation goes into the battery or into consumption on site instead of being curtailed or exported at a negative price. The plan accounts for low and negative price intervals and for your export limit.
Lower Peak Demand Costs
The plan keeps the quarter-hour maximum within your reserved capacity and helps you avoid demand charges and and penalties for exceeding it.
Avoid Buying at High Prices
When grid prices are high, the plan draws on the battery instead of buying from the grid.
See the Economics Interval by Interval
An expected result for every 15 minutes, so you see why the plan looks the way it does.
Deciding Before You Build?
Energy Portfolio Simulator sizes the PV and battery for your site before the investment. WattNext plans how they run once they are in place.
How WattNext Works
Inputs
- PV generation prediction for the next day – from SkyEye or supplied by you
- Day-ahead prices
- Battery parameters: power, capacity, round-trip efficiency, state-of-charge limits
- Grid connection and contractual limits
Optimization
A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model finds the plan with the best expected value. It plans battery price arbitrage explicitly, and in intervals with negative or very low prices it charges the battery or curtails output.
Output
Updated throughout the day: the 15-minute net export profile of the portfolio, the expected battery state-of-charge trajectory, and an economic breakdown per interval.
Interested in WattNext?
Get in touch and we will show you how WattNext would plan the dispatch of your portfolio.
Contact us