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Belgium
Here are nine energy settlement questions Bnewable's customers in Belgium ask most often, with answers from our own energy settlement expert, Rob Coutuer on how it works in practice.
Adding a battery storage system behind your grid connection leaves your supplier, your energy contract, and your invoice exactly as they are. Here are nine energy settlement questions Bnewable's customers in Belgium ask most often, with answers from our own energy settlement expert, Rob Coutuer on how it works in practice.
No. Bnewable is supplier-agnostic and works with whichever supplier you already have. To make that possible, we’ve built bilateral agreements with energy suppliers across Belgium.
Supplier pricing, contract terms, and service quality can all shift over time. If a battery storage system only worked with one specific supplier, every future supplier decision would also become a battery decision, and that risk has nothing to do with the battery storage system itself.
Bnewable keeps your choice of supplier and your choice of battery storage provider completely separate. Your existing supply contract stays exactly as it is.
No. Your contract continues to cover exactly what it covered before: your site's own consumption and generation, as if the battery storage system weren't there.
This is one of the more common misconceptions in the market, and it has a clear source. Some BESS providers structure their offering in a way that pushes clients toward one of two exposures:
Both can suit advanced energy buyers who actively want that exposure.
Bnewable operates as a Balance Responsible Party (BRP) and has bilateral agreements in place with suppliers across the Belgian market. This allows us to operate the battery storage system entirely outside your energy contract, as an isolated asset that it trades independently. We then share the value the battery storage system generates with you. You keep the freedom to choose whichever energy contract fits your needs.
Bnewable has bilateral agreements with the following suppliers today:
Bnewable puts a bilateral agreement in place with your existing supplier that separates the battery storage system's activity from your site's own consumption and generation. Your supplier keeps billing your site exactly as before, and Bnewable settles the battery storage system separately under its own BRP position.
Why is an agreement necessary? In Belgium, a single access point can only have one BRP holding offtake and injection at any time. A battery storage system behind your existing grid connection shares that access point with your site. To trade independently on the day-ahead, intraday, imbalance, frequency containment reserve (FCR), and automatic frequency restoration reserve (aFRR) markets, its activity must be separated from the supply contract that already covers your site.
How does the agreement work? Bnewable uses Elia's regulated “transfer-of-energy" framework, where the energy is "transferred" from the portfolio of the supplier of the customer’s site to our portfolio. All battery activations and their volumes become our responsibility.
What does Bnewable ask of your energy supplier? We ask energy suppliers to keep treating your site's baseline profile as if the battery storage system weren't there. Your supplier doesn't forecast the battery storage system, price it, or absorb any of its risks. That narrow scope is why energy suppliers across the Belgian market have signed these agreements with Bnewable.
Bnewable calculates your energy invoice twice: once without the battery storage system, and once with it. Both calculations use your actual site's consumption and your existing tariff structure. Bnewable then compares them line by line across grid fees, energy volumes, levies, and taxes every day, at a 15-minute interval. That way, you can verify for yourself, at any point, that your invoice is unaffected.
Yes, we negotiate our energy supplier agreements specifically to produce this outcome.
With our bilateral agreements in place, Bnewable acts as BRP for the battery storage system. The battery storage system stays structurally isolated from your site's own consumption and generation profile. As a result:
Bnewable quantifies two separate value streams and reconciles both against what you would have paid without the battery storage system.
Gross trading revenue shows what the battery storage system earns on the markets. But it doesn’t show whether your business is better off. Charging can add grid offtake, raise your site’s peak, and those costs can cancel out part or all the trading revenue. The only way to know the net result is to compare your invoice with the battery storage system against your invoice without it. Some operators in the market report on gross trading performance only, which leaves their clients with no way to check that net result.
Bnewable's before/after invoice comparison closes that gap. Every value we claim traces back to a specific difference between your invoice with the battery storage system and your invoice without it.
Bnewable shares both value streams with you according to the ownership and investment structure you agree upfront. That structure can be a lease model, a shared-savings arrangement, or full client ownership with Bnewable operating the battery storage system as a service provider.
The mechanism stays the same in every structure. The before/after invoice calculation provides the audit trail that proves the value is real. The sharing arrangement guarantees that the value reaches your business in the proportion you agreed to.
We always prioritize your site's self-consumption. Bnewable Voltana makes sure your site puts your solar power to work for your own operations before anything else happens with it.
Solar generation rarely matches site consumption throughout the day, so a site with meaningful solar capacity often injects surplus energy onto the grid. When the battery storage system charges directly from your solar installation, it stores energy your site would otherwise have injected, usually at a lower value than the grid offtake it now replaces.
The before/after invoice calculation captures this value explicitly. The difference across grid fees, taxes, levies, and energy costs shows what the battery storage system adds by increasing your self-consumption. That value flows through the same sharing mechanism as every other value stream.
No. Bnewable already has agreements in place with PPA providers for this configuration. The effect depends on how your PPA is structured:
In both cases, Bnewable settles this energy at your existing PPA price, so the battery storage system introduces no new pricing risk and your invoice stays unaffected. You benefit from higher self-consumption and the additional market value the battery storage system generates. Your PPA provider benefits from the same increase in self-consumption.
Contact us for an intake.
You don’t need to develop any internal energy expertise; we store, manage, and optimize your electricity for you. Contact us to explore what that would look like for your business.
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