Storage Strategies for the Dynamic Tariff Era
Same homes, same batteries, three strategies: AI dispatch, a timer, and nothing at all. After a full year across 22 households, the gap between the best and the laziest setup is €310 — per year, per home.
The dynamic tariff changed what a battery is. On a fixed contract, storage is a self-consumption appliance: store your solar, use it later, done. On a dynamic contract with quarter-hour prices, storage becomes a trading position that never sleeps. The question we set out to answer was whether the “AI” in the marketing decks earns its premium over a €0 timer.
The setup: 22 households in Flanders and the southern Netherlands, all on dynamic contracts, all with 9.6–10.2 kWh batteries. Eight ran vendor AI dispatch, seven ran a fixed charge-overnight-discharge-evening timer, seven ran no strategy at all beyond default self-consumption. We tracked every quarter-hour for twelve months.
The results compress into three sentences. Doing nothing is the worst strategy by a wide margin — the default settings miss every negative-price window and discharge whenever the sun goes down, price-blind. The timer captures most of the spread in winter, when prices are predictably low at night and high at 18:00, and fails in summer, when the cheap window moves to solar noon and the timer cannot follow. The AI dispatch won, but by less than the brochures suggest: €310 a year over doing nothing, and only €95 over a seasonally adjusted timer.
The detail that matters for your purchase decision: the €95 AI premium over a good timer is real but modest, and it concentrates in spring and autumn when price patterns are erratic. If your vendor charges a subscription for the AI feature, do the maths with our numbers, not theirs. At €5 a month, the subscription eats two-thirds of the edge.
Two operational findings came free. First, negative-price hours — 520 of them last year in our market — are the single biggest contributor to AI’s edge: paid-to-charge windows are too irregular for any timer. Second, one in five households had dispatch fighting the heat pump’s own schedule, a misconfiguration that cost up to €90 a year and was invisible until we charted it. If you run both systems, check that they are not bidding against each other.
What to do with this: if you own a battery on a dynamic contract, any strategy beats none — set the timer tonight. If you are buying, weight the dispatch software’s actual tariff integrations (which suppliers, which markets) over the word “AI”. And if a vendor quotes you savings from dispatch alone, ask them to show the timer baseline.
Method: 22 households, 12 months of quarter-hour settlement data, 2025–2026. Households self-selected; results are indicative, not a controlled trial.