Roger Hollies, Arenko CTO, recently joined the Modo Energy podcast to discuss the evolution of grid-scale energy storage and the software that powers it.
The conversation charted Arenko’s journey from a pioneering start-up to market leader, sitting alongside industry heavyweights like Kraken. Throughout the interview, Roger detailed how Arenko is actively shaping the pace of change in the market, delivering the transparency and automation required to support the largest, most complex energy portfolios.
Here are the key takeaways:
Built by Owners, for Owners
Roger reflected on Arenko’s decade of experience, noting that the company’s authority comes from having been in the trenches. Founded in 2015, Arenko originally developed and installed some of the UK’s first battery sites.
Because existing market solutions couldn’t handle the complex “time-shifting” and power quality services batteries provide, Arenko built its own control technology. Roger explained that this hands-on experience sparked the pivot from asset owners to SaaS provider, “we soon realised our USP was the software technology itself.” By solving their own problems first, Arenko created Nimbus, a platform now trusted by major energy players to manage nearly 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of operational batteries and co-located renewables across the UK, Texas, Germany, and Ireland.
The “Swiss Army Knife” of Flexibility
A major theme of the podcast was the sheer complexity of managing gigawatt-scale portfolios. Roger described the battery as the most complex asset class, capable of responding to power changes at 20 Hertz (20 times a second).
To manage this, he described the Nimbus platform as a modular “Swiss Army knife.” This flexibility is vital for customers like Ørsted and RWE, who require a system that can:
- Scale immediately: Supporting companies moving from traditional assets to their first 50MW battery systems.
- Integrate seamlessly: Using modern API connectivity to “play well with others,” integrating third-party analytics (such as Twaice and Accure).
- Offer choice: Allowing clients to use Arenko’s end-to-end trading automation or “peel back” the layers to inject their own IP and forecasting.
7 Billion Data Points: Automation at Scale
The discussion highlighted that at the market leader level, human operation alone is no longer feasible. With 1.2 GW of assets under management, Arenko collects seven billion data points daily to feed the system.
Roger explained how Arenko utilises AI not as a buzzword, but as an essential productivity tool to handle this scale. The optimisation engine runs every minute, employing neural networks and self-learning models to predict market prices and determine the future state of the battery. This results in a new plan every 60 seconds, calculating the maximum revenue pathway for the next 24 to 36 hours.
From “Black Box” to “Glass Box”
One of the most compelling points Roger raised was the industry-wide issue of trust in automation. To counter the traditional “black box” nature of algorithmic trading, Arenko is pioneering a “Glass Box” approach.
Roger detailed a visualisation tool that offers complete transparency (in beta phase). Users can look back at any historic one-minute interval to see exactly what the engine saw: the constraints, the committed services, the trades, and the price forecasts. This ensures that trust comes from understanding what the automation is doing, allowing asset owners to review decisions and improve logic and forecasts.
Challenging the Industry: Policing Markets and Rules as Code
Finally, the interview touched on Arenko’s role in driving industry standards. Roger advocated for “policing the markets” to ensure accuracy and reliability. He suggested that the National Energy System Operator (NESO) should publicly release performance data for individual assets, including penalties, to provide much-needed clarity for asset owners when making investment decisions regarding accuracy and reliability.
He also outlined a vision for moving the grid towards “rules as code” and “infrastructure as code,” reinforcing Arenko’s position at the forefront of the digital energy transition.
