What a battery capture rate measures, why it needs an optimal-dispatch benchmark, and how the NEMPulse Capture Rate scores actual revenue against a perfect and a forecast-informed optimum.
Raw revenue tells you how much a battery earned, but not how well it was run. A big battery in a volatile region will out-earn a small one in a calm region no matter how each is operated. Capture rate is the metric that strips that away: it measures how much of the value actually available to a battery it managed to capture.
A capture rate is a ratio — actual revenue divided by a benchmark of what was achievable. The hard part is the benchmark. NEMPulse builds one by running a linear-programming optimisation over the same historical prices the battery actually faced, co-optimising energy arbitrage and all ten FCAS markets on the same unit, subject to the battery's real constraints: its state-of-charge limits, a per-day cycle cap, and its FCAS response obligations. That produces the most revenue the battery could physically have earned.
The NEMPulse Capture Rate expresses a battery's actual gross market revenue as a percentage of that optimal benchmark. It is published against two reference points. The perfect-foresight ceiling assumes every future price was known in advance — a theoretical maximum no real operator can reach, capped at 100%, useful for sizing the total opportunity. The forecast-informed benchmark instead solves against AEMO's own free public price forecast (issued before each trading day, no hindsight) and settles at the prices that actually occurred, isolating the value of price information alone.
A high capture rate means a battery is timing its charge and discharge close to the best the market allowed; a low one means it left value on the table — through conservative bidding, contracting that overrides spot signals, or simply missing the moves. Because the forecast benchmark holds execution flexibility equal to the perfect case, actual revenue can sit above it (a better private forecast or execution edge) or below it; only the perfect ceiling is a true upper bound. That honesty is the point — the benchmark is a reference, not a scorecard grade.
NEMPulse publishes the NEMPulse Capture Rate for every grid-scale battery in the NEM and ranks the fleet by it, filterable by region and duration.
More guides: How does a grid-scale battery make money in the NEM?Why do battery revenues rise and fall in the NEM?
See also: Performance rankingsActual vs optimalEnergy capture — glossary
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