Modeled vs. empirical wholesale market value for co-located solar + storage projects

May 21, 2026

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has published a new study and accompanying data resources on the wholesale market value of large-scale co-located photovoltaic-plus-storage (PV+S) projects in the United States.

The research estimates the wholesale market value of 280 operational PV+S projects across the seven ISOs/RTOs and 19 additional balancing authorities, representing roughly 95% of the U.S. PV+S fleet in 2024. The analysis models optimized hourly dispatch under energy, capacity, and ancillary-service market opportunities, and compares the resulting value with standalone PV value, project-specific levelized cost estimates, and empirical operating or revenue data where available.

Some of the key findings include:

  • In an optimized dispatch case with perfect price foresight, adding batteries increased the modeled national generation-weighted market value of hypothetical standalone solar from $29/MWh to $75/MWh in 2024. The modeled value increase was driven by higher capacity value, followed by ancillary-service value and energy shifting.
  • For projects with available cost data, optimized PV+S market value between 2020 and 2024 exceeded levelized generation cost by nearly $35/MWh when accounting for tax credits.
  • Empirical operating and revenue data were available for 51 projects. In 2024, observed PV+S operations realized $39/MWh, or 62% of the modeled value.
  • The realized storage premium reached 38% of its modeled optimized value in 2024, suggesting that many projects had the potential for greater wholesale market contributions.
  • Differences between optimized and observed value reflect a range of possible factors, including wholesale market participation, bilateral capacity prices, grid-charging restrictions for some older projects, dispatch practices, price and generation forecasting, visibility of price signals in non-ISO regions, and contract or program incentives.

The research findings are available as a briefing slide deck and a data summary file of annual optimized wholesale market values from the base scenario. In addition, plant-level hourly modeled generation and battery dispatch data and annual value estimates are available through the Open Energy Data Initiative.

For more information:

We appreciate the support of the U.S. Department of Energy for making this work possible.