Beating the Benchmark: Evolving Energy Storage Bidding in the US

Key Takeaways

• Amid ever-increasing market changes and complexity, traditional approaches to energy trading and arbitrage can no longer keep up, which leaves considerable revenue on the table.

• With Fluence Mosaic™, the advanced AI-powered bidding software that continually evolves, storage asset owners and operators are able to maximize their revenue opportunities while minimizing risk.

• Recent enhancements to Mosaic helped assets significantly outperform the average gains for CAISO (California Independent System Operators) in the summer of 2025, translating into an additional $3 million in revenue.

Fluence maintains one of the largest fleet of energy storage projects in the world. This scale provides unique insight into how electricity market design evolution and bidding strategies influence project economics. Through our Mosaic AI-powered bidding and trading software, asset owners are better positioned to take full advantage of the arbitrage opportunities that increase a storage system’s lifetime value.

Case in Point

In the summer of 2025, assets optimized with Mosaic outperformed the CAISO market average by 50%. Despite compressed fleet-wide merchant revenues from tighter energy price spreads and an increased deployment of energy storage solutions, assets using Mosaic’s new DART (Day-Ahead/Real-Time) Co-Optimization framework achieved a 204% improvement over the CAISO average.

In practice, these methods have direct implications on asset profitability. The aforementioned assets captured an additional $3 million in revenue over the four-month evaluation period. And results over a 12-month period showed similar spreads between Mosaic-optimized assets and the market benchmark, with a 43.5% higher dollars/kW-month outcome.

Mosaic represents the integration of advanced price forecasting, machine-learning algorithms, and deep global and local market expertise. The unifying goal is to deliver optimized outcomes through strategies tailored to each customer’s specific risk profile.

Reimagining Bidding as Usual

With rapid expansion, heightened volatility, new products, and a steady flow of emerging regulations, the energy trading market is always in flux. How asset owners and operators bid and trade, however, hasn’t necessarily kept pace. 

 For example, many still rely on outdated strategies, like chasing spikes that used to occur in real time that don’t exist in the same way. While less sophisticated strategies may still produce feasible outcomes, they don't maximize revenue potential. They also may not account for change: An approach that works one day won’t necessarily work every day.  

Fluence designs Mosaic to consider change a constant feature of today’s energy markets. We stay focused on the evolving market and market structures, watching trends like narrowing spreads and shifting midday pricing dynamics, as well as variables beyond single price forecasts, such as probability distributions for energy, ancillary services, deployment likelihoods, and system conditions. 

Ongoing enhancements to our Mosaic software—including those that led to summer 2025’s standout statistics—demonstrated this strategy in action. 

DART: More Informed, Adaptive, and Profitable Trading  

The standard CAISO bidding process is sequential. Operators bid for full positions in day-ahead markets and defend those positions in fifteen-minute market (FMM) trading and real-time dispatch (RTD).

With our patent pending DART enhancements we brought a new approach to Mosaic: ingesting more forward-looking information and explicitly modeling the interactions between the day-ahead and real-time markets, rather than treating them independently. Such an approach enables more informed, adaptive, and profitable bidding strategies. Knowing the real-time potential is critical to avoid being shut out of opportunities by over-participating in the day ahead.

Adding Value with New Revenue Streams

Today’s volatile markets mean value stacking is no longer an optional consideration for asset owners; it’s an essential business strategy. Fluence helps owners find various ways for their assets to generate value. Mosaic’s co-location and co-optimization features, for instance, maximize revenues related to how two or more assets operate together.

Mosaic brings the latest statistical methods, advanced algorithms, and continuous tracking and monitoring to the challenge, to account for the full range of possible forecasts. Importantly, this forecasting capability includes both Fluence and non-Fluence resources, as we take a unique technology-agnostic stance toward our products and services. Our software works across the full portfolio of battery types, along with wind and solar, to expand the scope of revenue opportunities.

Mosaic and its enhancements aren’t restricted to CAISO owners and operators. The software is producing results in other markets as well, including the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) market, the Japan Electric Power Exchange (JEPX), and in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM). We’re committed to fully understanding a customer’s monetization strategy, wherever that customer operates.

Feedback Loops and Foresight Drive Value

Catalyzing all innovation at Fluence is a culture of continuous improvement. We’re reoptimizing at every opportunity based on what's actually occurred in the market, so customers don’t get stuck with a plan that predicted one thing but ended up in a different position.

Human intelligence underpins the perpetual evolution of Fluence’s machine learning models. Our data experts review the results we get on a daily basis to make the most informed decisions. A feedback loop back into the product ensures Mosaic takes all of these learnings and observations into account.

Asset owners and developers can use Mosaic to get a sense of potential bidding and trading revenues before they break ground on their projects. The decisions made in these early stages can affect project financing, how much money can be made when the storge system eventually comes online, and more. Asset owners benefit from understanding and capturing market value throughout their entire project lifecycle. That’s where Fluence comes in.

Add the Power of Mosaic to Your Energy Storage System

Contact the experts at Fluence to learn more about increasing your revenue opportunities with Mosaic’s bidding and trading solutions for standalone and co-located storage, hybrids, and solar.