Spreadsheet errors, not market conditions, are blocking PJM battery storage financing, enSights CEO says

PJM battery storage developers are struggling to close financing despite market conditions that should favour them, and the root cause is often their own financial models, according to Alon Maskovich, CEO and co-founder of enSights, a renewable energy portfolio management software company^[1].

The modelling problem

PJM's BESS developers are building financial models that struggle to satisfy investors, even as data centres drive up electricity demand across the interconnection, capacity auctions show supply constraints, and peak prices rise^[1].

The specific failure mode Maskovich identifies is double-counting. "When you are running it on spreadsheets and you are trying to do different simulations, usually (developers) are double counting different aspects of the regulations," he said in an interview with Energy-Storage.news^[1].

The error is easy to make. PJM battery revenue is no longer driven by a single source. Project returns now depend on a combination of utility savings, demand charge reduction, energy arbitrage, capacity market participation, and incentive programmes - each with its own eligibility rules, dispatch constraints, and regulatory limits. Stacking those streams in a spreadsheet without enforcing the physical and market constraints that govern them produces projections that lenders cannot validate.

PJM's regulation market - historically the dominant revenue source for batteries, contributing the majority of BESS revenues - is only around 750 MW in size, meaning saturation pressure builds quickly as the fleet grows.

A market that should be working

The irony, Maskovich argues, is that the underlying economics are sound. PJM led all US ISOs on per-megawatt battery revenue in early 2026, averaging $62/kW-month following its October 2025 Regulation market redesign - up sharply from roughly $20/kW-month before the change.

US utility-scale storage capacity has grown from 1.5 GW in 2020 to over 46 GW today, with 16 GW entering service in the most recent year alone. PJM's own pipeline is accelerating: the interconnection operator awarded 23 BESS resources totalling 2.2 GW with interconnection agreements in its first reformed transition cycle.

The demand signal is equally clear. Data centre load growth is reshaping PJM's capacity requirements, and the RTO filed a backstop auction and curtailment framework at FERC on 31 July 2026 targeting a 6.8 GW near-term shortfall.

Behind-the-meter as a pressure valve

Maskovich sees behind-the-meter (BTM) storage as a particular opportunity in this environment. "BTM I think is going to be a huge accelerator for bringing energy online and stabilising the grid and helping with all these bottlenecks," he said^[1].

BTM projects can help commercial and industrial facilities manage peak demand charges while also providing grid services - but modelling that dual role accurately requires connecting operational assumptions to financial outcomes in a way that static spreadsheets rarely achieve^[1].

Lessons from solar

Maskovich draws an explicit parallel to an earlier technology cycle. After two decades working with commercial and industrial customers on decarbonisation, he has observed the BESS industry repeating modelling mistakes the solar industry made years ago^[1].

The solar parallel is instructive: early solar developers routinely overstated yield projections and underestimated degradation, eroding lender confidence until standardised modelling practices and independent engineering reviews became market norms. Maskovich's argument is that BESS is at an equivalent inflection point, where the industry needs to:

• Use validated, market-specific data rather than generic assumptions
• Connect pre-construction revenue projections to operational performance tracking
• Enforce regulatory constraints - particularly around regulation market eligibility and capacity obligations - within the model itself, not as manual adjustments^[1]

enSights launched a Battery Economics Calculator for the PJM market in July 2026, designed to combine battery sizing, degradation parameters, revenue modelling, and ROI analysis within a single auditable framework linked to its broader energy management platform.

What to watch

The near-term test is whether lenders begin requiring more rigorous modelling standards as a condition of financing - as they eventually did in solar. PJM's regulation market saturation risk, which grows as the battery fleet expands, will make the quality of revenue-stack assumptions increasingly consequential for projects seeking non-recourse debt. Developers whose models cannot demonstrate how they will perform once regulation revenues compress are likely to face continued friction with investors regardless of headline market conditions.