Why your battery is not fully charged - and you are better for it.
Why does your battery sometimes not charge to full capacity even when the sun is shining brightly? With FlexiO your home battery is cleverly controlled to get maximum efficiency from your installation. By deliberately not always charging to 100%, you can help keep the electricity grid balanced and earn money as well. Find out how grid balancing works and why it's good news if your battery is not completely full.
Sunny days and a well-stocked home battery seem like a perfect combination at first glance. But sometimes you notice that your battery was not fully charged while the sun was shining brightly. Logical? No. Desirable? Absolutely.
Thanks to FlexiO's smart control, your battery is purposefully not always filled to 100%. Why that is, we are happy to explain. Spoiler: it's all about smart choices, better yields and a healthier power grid.
One example: Negative prices, smart choices
On May 1, 2025, it was a very sunny day. It was predicted to be. You would expect your battery to be fully charged all day. That would make sense because there was a lot of sunshine. Yet that wasn't true at any time of day. That's because of grid balancing.
What is gridbalancing and why is it important on sunny days?
Grid balancing is all about balancing supply and demand on the electricity grid. On days with lots of sunshine and little consumption, the grid gets out of balance. We want to prevent that, of course. On such days, grid balancing has extra value.
In such situations, power prices drop, sometimes to below zero. Injecting extra solar production that you don't consume or that you don't store when your battery would already be fully charged, then just works counterproductively and can cost you money.
On extremely sunny days, like on the first of May 2025, that means: not charging to 100% or even limiting your solar panels for a while, also known as curtailing.
How does your battery help the grid?
In situations like this, it is important that your battery remains flexible: it must be able to store energy when there is too much. And you need to be able to release energy when there is a sudden shortage, even on extremely sunny days.
That's why FlexiO keeps a part of your battery capacity free at certain times. This is necessary to be able to charge or discharge your battery at any time depending on the grid.
FlexiO Balances the Grid for You
What was FlexiO doing on the first of May 2025? Thanks to the weather forecast and day-ahead prices, FlexiO knew it would be a sunny afternoon.
- Between 8am and 11am, energy was actively extracted from your battery and fed into the grid. At this time, your generated power still had value. This freed up space on your battery for the afternoon. We do this for PV plants that we cannot curtail, but we do not always do so if we can curtail. For plants that can curtail, it may be more efficient to leave power in the battery.
- Between 12pm and 16pm, your solar production was then stored in the battery, without additional injection to the grid and with maximum efficiency. Injection at this time would mean unbalancing the already congested grid and paying for your injection.
A Smart Buffer for Maximum Yield
Despite the injection price being negative, there may still be a shortfall on the grid. If your plant is currently participating in FCR (or Frequency Containment Reserve), you will still inject at negative prices. These costs are reimbursed by LIFEPOWR. More than that, you generate income by making your battery capacity available for Elia. So you are not left with a loss.
LIFEPOWR only leases your battery capacity to Elia (the system operator) for FCR when it offers more revenue than savings. So the system always keeps your benefit in mind.
Expectation: your battery will be filled with solar energy.
Reality: it does, but always with a smart buffer and maximum yield.
Why Grid Balancing is Good for You and the Grid
How does this benefit you as a user?
- A higher return on your battery
- A fee for balancing the grid
- Smart deployment of your installation, tailored to your energy tariff
And for the grid? There is less pressure at peak times, less waste of solar energy and more stability.
In short: your battery is more active and valuable than you think, even (or just) when it is not fully charged. A win-win situation, in other words!
Trust the System, FlexiO Works for You
It may seem counterintuitive that your battery is not fully charged on a sunny day. But with smart steering through FlexiO, that just means the system is proactively working in your favour. Not just financially, but also for the wider energy system!
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