If you already have a commercial battery setup at one or more of your sites, P415 may provide your business with a way to earn income from the electricity market.
Read on to find out what P415 is, whether you can take part in it, how P415 trades work, and how to choose the best trading partner for your firm.
What does P415 mean for your business?
For businesses with a suitable battery setup in Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales), P415 means you can sign a separate agreement with a battery trading provider to earn income from wholesale electricity trading while staying with your current electricity supplier and tariff.
Who carries out a P415 battery trade?
Battery trading providers may be:
- Energy aggregators: They combine your battery with batteries and other equipment at different sites.
- Virtual power plant operators (VPP): They control a group of batteries and other equipment as one larger energy resource.
A Virtual Trading Party, or VTP, places the trade in the wholesale electricity market. Your aggregator/VPP may also be the VTP or may use another company to perform that role.
Could you take part in P415 with your commercial battery setup?
You’ll need to check with a trading company first. They’ll run these initial checks:
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is your site in Great Britain? | P415 applies in England, Scotland, and Wales. Different market rules apply in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland |
| Can we access readings from your electricity meter? | The provider needs them to see how much electricity your site uses and when |
| What battery and inverter do you have? | The provider checks whether their software can connect to and control your battery and inverter (the device that converts electricity between the battery and your site or the grid) |
| What do you currently use the battery for? | The provider needs to make sure that, during a trade, it doesn’t make the battery unavailable for anything your site still needs it to do |
| Does your site have limits on how much electricity it can import or export? | The provider will check whether your site can import or export enough electricity for the battery to complete a trade. |
These are only the main checks in the first instance. If it looks like you qualify, the provider will ask you for more details.
How does P415 battery trades work?
There are four main steps in a P415 trade, and they are:
1. Work out how much electricity the site would take from or send to the grid if there was no trade
In battery trading, the baseline determines how much of the change in your site’s electricity use counts towards the trade. It estimates how much electricity your site would have imported or exported if the trade hadn’t taken place.
Elexon’s baselining methodology is a good read, explaining in more detail how P415 baselines are calculated.
2. Place the trade
The Virtual Trading Party uses the baseline to work out how much less electricity your site took from the grid, or how much more it sent to the grid, and trades that amount.
3. Control the battery
The battery trading provider sends instructions to the inverter, which controls when your battery charges or discharges.
4. Measure what happened
The provider’s software uses meter data to see how much electricity your site actually imported or exported.
It compares this with the baseline and applies the settlement rules. The provider then sends you a statement and any payment due under the trading agreement.
How do you know whether a P415 trade is worthwhile? (with three examples)
Your battery energy trading provider considers opportunity cost before they take any action. Opportunity cost is the value your battery could have created by doing something else instead.
Ways your battery can create value include:
- Using cheaper stored electricity later when grid electricity costs more, known as energy arbitrage
- Cutting a peak in site demand
- Storing surplus solar power
- Supporting EV charging
- Keeping backup power in reserve
Example one: your provider might consider discharging the battery for a P415 trade now but discover that using the same stored electricity to reduce your site’s import during the evening peak would save more money.
Example two: if discharging the battery during the evening peak would save 25p per kWh, a P415 trade returning 18p per kWh wouldn’t be worthwhile because it would earn 7p less per kWh than using the battery to avoid the evening import. Your provider should keep the battery charged for the evening instead.
But a trade returning 32p per kWh may be better, if the provider can show that the trade would still leave your business with more than 25p per kWh after deducting:
- The cost of charging the battery
- Energy lost while charging and discharging
- Provider fees or revenue share
- Additional battery wear
- Any site saving the battery gives up
Example three: A P415 trade doesn’t always involve exporting electricity. It may create value by reducing how much electricity the site was expected to import.
Suppose your site would normally use 75 kWh over 30 minutes, while your battery was scheduled to charge by another 50 kWh under its normal operating plan. Without the trade, your site would import 125 kWh in total.
The trading provider stops your battery from charging, so your site imports only the 75 kWh it needs. This reduces its import by 50 kWh.
The trade here is the 50 kWh reduction in import. The Virtual Trading Party trades that reduction in the wholesale market, and your battery trading provider pays your business the amount due under your agreement.
Add more value with P415 through GridVolt
Contact GridVolt for an end-to-end P415 trading solution.
Our energy management software connects to most batteries and inverters (call us to check). Energy Manager controls when your battery charges and discharges to reduce your electricity costs while GridTrade uses it for wholesale electricity trading.
Let our sophisticated software, which updates 96 times a day, manage when your battery charges, discharges, holds electricity back, or trades, depending on which action is expected to deliver your company the greatest financial benefit.
All this happens automatically in the background while keeping enough electricity available for the site’s needs.
To find out more, fill in the form on the right or get in touch via the contact page.
Frequently asked questions about P415
What did P415 change?
P415 is the mechanism independent aggregators use to sell their clients’ battery flexibility into the wholesale energy market. Battery flexibility is the ability to change when your battery imports, stores or exports electricity.
Before P415, firms normally needed their electricity supplier to provide this route into the wholesale market. Most didn’t offer this service as they had no setup to manage trading, settlement and imbalance risk for behind-the-meter batteries.
Ofgem approved this Balancing and Settlement Code modification on 6 October 2023. It went live when Elexon implemented it on 7 November 2024 as part of the November 2024 BSC Standard Release.
Do I need to change my electricity supplier to use P415?
No. You can keep your existing electricity supplier and sign a separate agreement with a battery trading provider.
Your supplier continues to charge for the electricity your site imports. Your trading provider manages your battery’s wholesale trades separately.
What is a Virtual Trading Party?
There are two parties in battery trading: an aggregator and a Virtual Trading Party (VTP). Aggregators manage your on-site battery. VTPs, a role created by the P415 rule, are approved market participants that carry out your wholesale trades for you.
In some cases, aggregators and VTPs are the same company. In others, aggregators work as trading partners with VTPs.
Either way, the benefit to you is that you don’t need to learn and execute trading yourself. Your aggregator handles that for you.
Your agreement should identify the company controlling your battery and the company acting as the VTP.
What is a P415 baseline?
A baseline is an estimate of how much electricity your site would have imported or exported if it didn’t take part in a trade.
A Virtual Trading Party trades these deviations, or changes from your site’s normal pattern of electricity usage.
The provider compares how much electricity your site was expected to take from or send to the grid with what actually happened. The difference is the amount counted towards the trade.
Is reducing electricity import the same as exporting?
No. If a provider stops your battery from charging, your site may import less electricity from the grid. That is called “reduced import”. If the battery discharges more electricity than your site is using, the excess crosses the meter and becomes an export.
They are different physical actions, but both can result in a change from the site’s baseline that can form a trade.
Do you need a half-hourly meter for P415?
A half-hourly meter records electricity use every half hour. This gives the trading provider the data it needs to measure changes in your site’s electricity use.
However, you don’t need one for every possible P415 arrangement. P483 introduced another route on 27 November 2025 for qualifying sites that use an asset meter to measure the battery or another controllable asset.
Having an ordinary smart meter doesn’t automatically mean the site qualifies for this route. Individual providers may also continue to require a half-hourly settled main meter. GridTrade currently does.
Can every commercial battery use P415?
No. P415 trading is not right for every site with commercial battery storage.
A compatible battery and inverter are essential. The trading provider needs to connect to your battery. If it cannot see and control the battery safely, it cannot trade it.
The provider should check the exact make, model, firmware and control interface, along with:
- Meter data
- Available charging and discharging power
- Usable battery capacity
- Live site demand
- Import and export limits
- Communications
- Warranty and operating restrictions
A battery may meet the general P415 rules but still fall outside a provider’s own technical or commercial requirements.
Is there a minimum battery size for P415?
No, but P415 trading usually makes more sense for batteries around 100 kWh or larger. Smaller batteries may not store enough power to make the trading income worth the setup and management.
GridVolt uses around 100 kWh or more as an initial commercial guide for GridTrade. We may be able to consider smaller batteries however depending on their power, location and site setup.
Does P415 guarantee battery trading income?
No. Two sites can have very similar battery setups yet earn very different amounts from P415 trading. That’s because a trade only works if the market price beats the value of using the battery on site and leaves enough to cover charging costs, losses and fees.
How much you earn also depends on the availability of your battery for trading, site demand, import and export limits, charging costs, energy losses, provider fees and battery wear.
Can you use P415 with a wholesale-linked tariff?
GridTrade doesn’t currently work with Agile or other tariffs linked to wholesale electricity prices.
On these tariffs, the software controlling your battery may already charge it when prices are low and use the stored electricity when prices rise. This makes it difficult to tell what the battery would have done anyway and what it did for the P415 trade.
Energy Manager is the more suitable GridVolt service for sites on these tariffs.
How do I know there’ll be enough electricity for my site after a trade?
Tell your provider what your battery must do for your site before they can take part in a trade on your behalf. For example, you may need it to cut expensive electricity use, support EV charging, store spare solar power, or keep energy for backup. The provider should only trade electricity your site doesn’t need.
Your agreement should say how much energy must stay in the battery, when the provider can trade, and whether someone at your site can stop or change an instruction.
What should your P415 payment statement show?
Your contract should show your share, when you get paid and what costs come out first. You should see what the battery saved, what it earned and when it did not trade.
Your statement should also show:
- The trading income generated
- Any import or export value included
- Provider fees or revenue share
- Any allowance for battery wear
- The final amount your business receives
- What the battery charged, discharged or held back
Site savings and trading income should be shown separately.
What are P510 and P511?
P510 and P511 are proposed changes connected with the way P415 operates.
P510 proposes replacing the current shared supplier compensation arrangements with direct, two-way payments between the affected parties. As of 27 July 2026, it remains in the assessment procedure and hasn’t reached a final decision.
P511 proposes preventing large generation assets that already have other routes to market from using P415. Its aim is to keep the route focused on consumer-led flexibility and smaller behind-the-meter generation. As of 27 July 2026, P511 is with Ofgem and hasn’t yet been implemented.
These changes mainly concern how the wider market operates. A commercial battery owner should ask the trading provider which rules apply to its site and agreement.