In the first quarter of 2026 the median ERCOT battery earned $1.92/kW-month, while the best one earned $19.35/kW-month. That is a tenfold gap between the middle of the pack and the top, on the same grid in the same months. The ERCOT BESS Revenue Leaderboard ranks all 293 batteries by that revenue, every number from public settlement data. This post is the Q1 read on where the money went.
The quarter in one number
Across 18.7 GW of operating storage the fleet averaged $1.90/kW-month, $105M of merchant revenue in total. Energy arbitrage was 68% of it, ancillary services the rest. The single richest site, PALACIOS_ESR1 in LZ_SOUTH, ran at $19.35/kW-month, more than ten times the median. A buyer comparing an asset against this fleet has a clear yardstick: the middle earns about $1.92/kW-month, and the gap to the top is the range an owner should investigate.
Winter Storm Fern put most of January's money in a single week
When did Q1 revenue actually land across ERCOT's load zones?
Daily fleet yield through the quarter. The late-January spike is Winter Storm Fern. A handful of batteries earned more in that one event than in a normal month, and that one week pulls the whole quarter's average up. Strip it out and February was the trough, March recovered toward the steady run-rate.
Why the spread is the story
Two forces set a battery's quarter. The first is the days it shows up for: scarcity is rare and short, so a site that was charged and ready for Storm Fern booked most of its January in a few hours. The second is how tightly it trades the ordinary days, the spread between charging cheap and discharging dear. The top of the board did both. The median did one or neither.
This is why a single fleet average hides more than it shows. The same $1.90 headline covers a site that earned $19.35 and a site that barely cleared its charging cost. For an owner the question is not what the fleet did, it is where their asset sits in that spread, and what the batteries above them did differently.
What the numbers are and are not
These are merchant market revenues rebuilt from ERCOT's public 60-day settlement disclosures, the same method behind every figure on the board, detailed in how we compute ERCOT BESS revenue. They are benchmark estimates, not settlement statements. Tolls, hedges and bilateral contracts are invisible in public data, so the board shows market revenue only. Negative days count. The quarter runs about two months behind the calendar because the disclosures do, so Q1 settled in full only this spring.
Where your asset sits
Every site's rank, zone, size and energy share is free on the leaderboard, with each settled month kept in the archive. Your own site's benchmark Q1 market revenue estimate is emailed free from the page. For the full dollar dataset on every battery, email hello@amperical.ai.