Grid balancing for households: earn from your home's flexibility

Grid balancing for households means ordinary homes get paid for helping keep the power grid stable. In practice, an aggregator connects your home’s flexible devices — heat pump, water heater, immersion heater or home battery — with many other households’ devices in a virtual power plant, and sells the combined flexibility as reserves to Energinet, Denmark’s transmission system operator. Your devices work as they always have; they just need to respond briefly when the grid calls. Why the grid needs balancing at all is covered in the foundation article on grid balancing — here we look at what it means for you as a household.

Why does Energinet pay households for grid balancing?

The grid must keep production and consumption in balance every second so the frequency stays at 50 Hz. Energinet therefore buys reserves such as FCR-D in daily auctions — one for every hour of the day. Reserves must respond within seconds, and household devices are genuinely good at this: a battery can change direction instantly, and a heat pump or immersion heater can pause briefly without anyone in the house noticing.

A single household is far too small to participate on its own — the market has requirements for both size and documentation. That is what aggregators are for: they orchestrate many households’ devices into one virtual power plant, keeping them in tune with the grid, bid the combined capacity into Energinet’s auctions and share the revenue. NM1 has been live as an aggregator since June 2025.

Which devices can take part?

Flexibility requires a store or a buffer that lets the device shift its consumption briefly:

• Home batteries are the fastest reserve on the grid and can deliver in both directions — see which batteries and inverters we can connect.
• Heat pumps use the building’s thermal mass and the hot water tank as a buffer — larger installations from 10 kW connect through Balance.
• Electric water heaters and immersion heaters have the water in the tank as storage: a short pause simply draws on hot water that is already there — see HeatSync.

If you already own a compatible device, signing up is free — there is no hardware cost to NM1. The device needs stable wifi (typically 2.4 GHz), and you install it yourself. See the product overview, or check which brands are supported on the integrations pages.

How often do your devices actually get activated?

Less often than most people imagine. Activations come in bursts: some days we see 5–6 activations, and then ten days can pass without a single one. On average a device is activated a few times a week, and each activation is short — seconds to minutes. Activations are designed to affect neither your comfort nor your equipment: a battery shifts a small amount of energy, and heating devices pause too briefly for the temperature to change noticeably.

The rest of the time, the reserve simply stands ready. That readiness is what Energinet pays for — not just the moments it is used.

What do you earn — and how do you follow along?

Auction revenue is shared between you and NM1, and payout happens quarterly as an ordinary bank transfer from NM1. Behind the scenes, NM1 is settled via eSett, the joint Nordic settlement of the balancing markets. FCR-D prices are set in daily auctions and vary — past earnings are no guarantee of future earnings. How earnings are calculated is shown on the earnings page.

As a customer you have a web app where you can see your devices, how many activations there have been in a chosen period, and your payouts — so you can follow what your home contributes.

How to get started

1. Check your device. If you have a heat pump, water heater, immersion heater or home battery, you are probably already qualified — see the integrations overview.
2. Sign up. With a compatible device it is free; if you buy a device from NM1, it arrives pre-configured. Both routes give the same agreement and earnings.
3. Let the device work. NM1 bids your flexibility into Energinet’s auctions, and you follow along in the web app.

Start on the get started page — and if you want to go deeper into the market behind it all, read about ancillary services.