Economic viability of stationary lithium-ion battery storage systems for industrial customers : a cluster-based analysis of 5359 German sites

Abstract

Industrial electricity prices in Germany rank among the highest in Europe. Stationary lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS) offer the potential to reduce costs through peak load reduction (peak shaving) and price arbitrage on the EPEX SPOT market. Previous studies have largely focused on individual sites or homogeneous consumer groups; large-scale analyses based on real spot-market price data are lacking. This paper systematically analyses all 5359 industrial load profiles from the publicly available VEA dataset and correlates the economic viability of three implementable operating strategies and an LP-optimal benchmark with a data-driven load profile typology. A two-stage cluster analysis identifies five statistically validated operation types (bootstrap stability ARI 0.81±0.19) alongside a small residual group of atypical, sporadic-load profiles (0.5% of sites). The peak-shaving threshold is optimised per site over a systematic sweep, and all economic parameters — battery cost, cost of capital, and grid capacity charges — are subjected to sensitivity analyses. The results show that sites with pronounced base-load demand and high equivalent full-load hours (> 2500 h) benefit most from battery storage, whereas single-shift operations with fewer than 2500 full-load hours can barely exploit heuristic strategies. Under the market conditions of the reference year 2024, 77.8% of the simulated sites achieve a positive net saving with at least one implementable heuristic; 92.8% are profitable under the LP benchmark, which constitutes a theoretical upper bound owing to its perfect annual price foresight. A multi-year evaluation over the price years 2019–2025 (including the 2022 crisis year and the most recent completed year 2025) brackets the robustness of these results.