Project note
Delivered energy
A business plan for battery-swap delivered energy that works in one narrow niche and matters most for what it implies about EVs, home batteries, and off-grid design.
exploration / energy systems / Published Jun 11, 2026 / Revised Jul 13, 2026
- Project: homelab-analytics
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No capital, no time, no intention to execute. Published because the analysis is the product.
A business plan for reviving the Finnish heating-oil delivery model with second-life batteries: a truck brings charged packs, takes empty ones away, and the customer never thinks about energy logistics again. The plan concludes the business is viable in exactly one narrow niche, is being structurally selected against everywhere else, and that its most interesting output is not a company but a set of implications for EVs, home batteries, and off-grid design.
The frame
Until the 2010s, a large share of Finnish detached houses heated with oil. The product was not oil; it was delivered energy — an annual truck visit, a full tank, zero customer involvement in the supply chain. The model died because the energy carrier died, not because the service model was wrong.
The proposal: rebuild the service model on batteries. Monthly or seasonal swap of charged packs, fixed-fee contract, depot charging done where electricity is cheapest — directly behind the meter at wind and solar plants, on curtailed and negative-price hours, using second-life EV packs whose remaining calendar life vastly exceeds their remaining cycle life.
Why now (and why mostly not)
Five environmental curves matter. Three bend toward the idea, one bends away, one cuts both ways.
Pack prices. Stationary-storage packs averaged $70/kWh in 2025, down 45% in one year according to BloombergNEF’s 2025 survey. The cheapest observed LFP packs hit $50/kWh. The model assumes second-life EV packs at €20–40/kWh as Europe’s first major EV retirement wave lands ~2027–2030. Direction: strongly favorable, but the second-life price is still an assumption rather than a quoted supply contract.
Second-life fit. The core economic flaw of swap-based heating is cycle waste: a pack swapped monthly cycles ~12 times a year, throwing away thousands of cycles of paid-for cycle life. Second-life packs are the mirror image — degraded cycle count, abundant calendar life, priced accordingly. A low-cycle seasonal application is the structurally correct home for retired EV batteries. This is the single strongest argument the concept has.
Distribution tariff drift. Finnish DSOs are shifting cost recovery toward fixed and power-based (tehomaksu) charges under cabling-mandate capex pressure. Every euro moved from variable to fixed strengthens the pitch to low-consumption customers, for whom effective all-in distribution cost already reaches €0.30–0.45/kWh. Rural connection fees of €15–45k keep rising. Direction: favorable, and it strengthens before the regulatory countermeasure arrives.
Cheap charging hours — the eroding enabler. Finland logged 725 negative-price hours in 2024 and 465 in 2025, according to Finnish Energy’s 2025 review using ENTSO-E data. Flexible demand — including grid batteries and electric boilers in district heating — is absorbing more of the spread. The arbitrage the depot depends on is being competed away by stationary players with no trucks. Direction: unfavorable; the model assigns a 40–50% probability that the spread stays exploitable through 2030.
Regulatory seams. Every margin component — avoided fixed fees, avoided winter transfer, sähkövero classification of a charged pack as goods rather than network-delivered electricity, customs treatment at the SE1/FI border — is an institutional artifact, not a physical one. Seams pay until a working group convenes. Direction: each seam individually short-lived; the portfolio of seams probably renews.
Net: the environment selects for the boring version (off-grid energy-as-a-service in places where the grid is expensive) and against the exciting version (national tariff arbitrage on wheels).
Unit economics
Cost stack per delivered kWh, second-life pack at €30/kWh, seasonal cottage service (5 swaps/winter of ~400 kWh):
| Component | €/kWh |
|---|---|
| Pack amortization (10-yr calendar life, ~50 lifetime cycles) | 0.06 |
| Depot charging (behind-the-meter PPA, curtailment hours) | 0.00–0.02 |
| Logistics (routed swap, ~8 stops/day) | 0.03–0.05 |
| Depot, handling, overhead | 0.02 |
| Delivered cost | 0.11–0.15 |
Against the alternatives the target customer actually faces: effective grid cost €0.30–0.45/kWh at cottage consumption levels, or €15–45k connection capex avoided entirely. The spread is real. It is also entirely composed of the other side’s fixed-cost structure.
The monthly full-house heating variant remains uncompetitive: 3.5 MWh/month deliveries, ~€0.10–0.12 delivered cost against €0.15–0.20 all-in grid — marginal, and squeezed from below by home batteries doing the same arbitrage through the existing wire.
Market sizing, Finland
| Segment | Size | Annual value/customer | Realistic SAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrified cottages, low consumption, high fixed cost | 495k registered cottages; est. 50–100k in viable density clusters | €600–1,200 | €30–120M/yr |
| New rural builds avoiding connection | ~2–4k/yr in expensive-connection zones | €800–1,500 | €2–6M/yr |
| Remaining oil-heated houses (full replacement) | shrinking; register data materially overstates active oil heating | n/a | excluded — heat pumps win |
| Construction / events / grid-queue temporary power | existing market, diesel-priced | €0.30–0.60/kWh | adjacent, already contested |
SOM for a pilot operator: hundreds of customers, low single-digit €M revenue, one depot, one truck route geometry. This is a lifestyle-business ceiling unless the model exports beyond Finland’s cottage belt.
Plan, 2026–2030
Phase 0, 2026 — paper. Vero advance ruling on sähkövero treatment of swapped packs. ADR assessment: lithium packs are UN 3480 Class 9 dangerous goods; routed multi-tonne residential delivery of used packs is a real compliance and insurance problem, possibly the plan’s hardest practical constraint. DSO tariff-reform watch. One spreadsheet model with contact-tested logistics quotes.
Phase 1, 2027 — pilot. One depot behind the meter at a wind park with curtailment history. 10–20 cottage customers in one route cluster. Second-life packs from the first meaningful EU supply. Success metric: delivered cost under €0.15/kWh with real trucks and real winters, zero thermal events.
Phase 2, 2028 — product split. Seasonal off-grid service plus the hybrid product: fuse-size arbitrage for grid-connected customers, where a swapped pack caps peak draw and the customer downsizes their main fuse against rising tehomaksu. Reserve-market stacking (FCR-D) on depot dwell capacity.
Phase 3, 2029–2030 — scale or fold. Decision gates: second-life pack price under €30/kWh at volume; charging spread surviving; no Energiavirasto bypass-fee response. Any gate fails, fold the operating business and keep the depot as a stationary storage asset — the fallback is itself a viable business, which is the plan’s main risk hedge.
Risk register
The fatal ones first. ADR and fire liability: transporting and residentially siting used lithium packs at scale may simply be unpermittable at acceptable insurance cost; this kills the plan before economics matter. Spread erosion: the depot’s charging advantage is being eaten by stationary flexibility; the 2024→2025 negative-hour decline is the market announcing it. Regulatory reflex: the margin is a tariff-structure short position; the moat is measured in legislative sessions. Home battery cannibalization: at $50/kWh packs, every customer is one wall-box purchase from self-supply, except where there is no wire at all — which is why the only defensible segment is the one without the wire.
The actual conclusions
The plan’s real value is what falls out of it when you remove the company.
The EV is the truck. A cottage-owning household driving a 75–100 kWh EV to the mökki every weekend already performs this exact logistics, for free, with hardware they own. V2L/V2H plus a small stationary buffer turns the family car into the delivery fleet, the depot into the home wallbox charged on night spot prices, and the business into a €500 adapter. The delivered-energy company is out-competed by its customers’ own vehicles — this is the strongest single finding.
Off-grid design point moved. At second-life pack prices, the rational new-build mökki skips the €25k connection: solar covers April–September, a 20–40 kWh pack plus either EV top-ups or a commercial winter-swap service covers the rest. The connection-fee comparison now loses in a growing share of rural cases.
Home batteries are the same trade through the wire. Everything the depot does — buy curtailment hours, sell against peak tariffs and fixed fees — a wall pack does without trucks, wherever a wire exists. The delivered-energy model is a proof that the arbitrage exists and a demonstration that stationary capture of it dominates mobile capture.
Delivered energy survives only where delivery is the product. No wire, no road to a wire, or no time to wait for one: construction sites, events, grid-queue-delayed industry, and the deep cottage belt. Everywhere else, the 1960s oil-truck nostalgia loses to the boring fact that the pipe was already built.
Sources and model boundary
The external anchors are deliberately few:
- BloombergNEF’s 2025 battery survey for new stationary-pack pricing
- Finnish Energy’s Electricity Year 2025 for negative-price hours
- Statistics Finland’s 2025 overview for 495,145 registered free-time residences in 2024
- Statistics Finland’s building-stock documentation for the warning that register data overstates active oil heating
Everything else in the cost stack and market sizing is an order-of-magnitude model assumption: second-life pack price and life, route density, depot cost, eligible-customer share, connection cost, and future tariff response. None is a supplier quote, regulatory ruling, or investment recommendation. The analysis is useful only if those inputs remain visible enough to replace.
The idea survived a long attempt to kill it in one room of the house. That room has no electricity, which is the point.