We just went live on a logistics terminal in the Netherlands. Five assets on site: a 2.5 MW battery, 1.5 MWp of solar, an electric crane, shore power for docked vessels, and a yard of refrigerated containers. One grid connection, capped at 300 kW by day and 1,500 kW at night.

Every asset pulls in its own direction. The crane draws hard, the reefers run all day and shore power spikes the moment a ship docks. Solar peaks at noon. The battery was put there to keep the site inside its grid limit, full stop. It is part of the site's license to operate.

But... a 2.5 MW battery that only sits and waits is a very expensive fuse.

So the customer asked the obvious question: can it also make money?

Yes, it can. And it's more than charging when power is cheap and discharging when it's expensive. The real value is in stacking it all at once: day-ahead, imbalance, peak shaving, self-consumption, all weighed against each other every few minutes. Safeguarding the grid and generating returns turn out to be the same decision.

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Running them together is not simply a matter of letting the assets help each other out. At every moment you have to model the whole site at once: every asset, every action it could take, and every cost that action would trigger, now and later. Charging the battery from solar instead of spilling, shaving the crane so a ship can plug in without breaching the daytime cap, shifting the reefers into the cheaper night, leaning on the grid or holding back. Each option has a price and a knock-on effect. You weigh them all and pick the one that leaves the site best off. The grid limit stops being a wall and becomes one more cost in the model, scheduled against everything else.

And none of this executes without a performant Energy Management System on site. The EMS safeguards everything locally, in real time, faster than any market signal can travel. It keeps the connection safe whatever happens, and it executes our steering signal asset by asset. Cloud optimisation decides the strategy; the EMS makes sure the site never crosses a line while following it.

This is where most sites are heading. More electrified, more constrained, too complex to run on gut feel. The ones that win treat their assets as one fleet, not five separate problems.

Curious what this would look like on your own site? Talk to us.