TLDR – The 30-Second Read
A grid-scale battery is two businesses wearing one hard hat.
There’s the asset you build – commissioning engineers, site managers, contracts and quality specialists who energise and integrate it. And the asset you run, a price-arbitrage business operated by battery traders and energy-market analysts once it’s live.
Those two roles share almost no skills, candidate pool or sourcing strategy, yet most employers scope them as one workforce. The ones who resource the build and forget the desk get caught flat when the asset switches on.
Why batteries suddenly need two completely different hires
For most of the last decade, a battery was treated as a piece of grid hardware: something you installed, energised and largely left alone to firm a nearby wind or solar farm. That framing is now out of date, and the hiring consequences are only starting to land.
Two things changed at once. The first is physical scale. Standalone battery storage in the National Electricity Market’s connection pipeline reached 33.2 GW in the first quarter of 2026, a 62% increase from 20.5GW a year earlier, with utility-scale battery storage now making up 49% of the total 67.3GW of projects progressing through the NEW connection process. In Q1 2026 alone, 4,445MW of new large-scale battery storage came online, adding 11,219MWh to the grid and more than doubling total installed battery storage in the NEM.
The second change is what batteries now do commercially. They’ve stopped being passive firming hardware and become active market participants. In the first quarter of 2026, battery storage set prices in 32% of trading intervals across the NEM, displacing hydro as the most frequent price-setting technology. Energy arbitrage revenue climbed by AU$55.1 million to AU $93.9 million, representing 97% of total battery storage revenue, up from 88% a year earlier. A battery is now, in large part, a busineses that buys cheap midday energy and sells it into the evening peak.
That is the split nobody scopes for. Building the asset and running the asset are two unrelated jobs. The ABC’s recent coverage of the battery face framed both halves of why batteries matter – they firm renewables physically and they flatten price volatility commercially – but the workforce implication sits underneath both: each half draws on a different talent market.
What the “build” workforce actually looks like
The physical side is closest to what energy and infrastructure employers already know how to hire, because it overlaps heavily with EPC and project-delivery talent. It’s commissioning engineers who energise and integrate the system, site managers who run the construction and grid-connection phase, and contracts and quality specialists who hold the delivery together against tight commercial-operation deadlines.
This is craft work, and it’s specialised in a way that surprises people coming from solar or wind delivery. Commissioning a grid-forming battery is not the same as commissioning a solar farm – around 74% of battery storage projects in the NEM pipeline are equipped with grid-forming inverters, which independently maintain grid voltage and frequency, providing system strength services that were traditionally supplied by coal- and gas-fired plants. The engineer who can prove that capability through hold-point testing and AEMO registration is a narrow market, and it’s getting narrower as the pipeline grows.
The build workforce is also heavily contract-shaped. It scales up through construction and commissioning, then largely demobilises once the asset is energised and handed to operations. Employers who’ve delivered transmission or renewables projects will recognise the rhythm – it’s the same early-design, mid-construction, late-commissioning curve, compressed into a shorter window.
What the “run” workforce actually looks like – and why it’s harder to find
Here’s where employers get caught. Once the battery is live, its commercial performance depends on people who never set foot on site: battery traders and energy-market analysts who decide, dispatch interval by interval, when to charge and when to discharge.
This is a financial-markets skill set dressed in an energy context. It sits much closer to a trading desk than to a project site, and the candidate pool reflects that – it’s small, it’s commercially sharp, and it overlaps with merchant power trading, commodities and quantitative analysis far more than with engineering. The people who can run a battery as an arbitrage book are competing for attention against energy retailers, trading houses and the developers’ own merchant desks.
And the value at stake is real. With arbitrage now representing 97% of battery storage revenue, the trader who reads the prices spread well is, in revenue terms, as important to the asset as the engineer who built it. Yet the desk is almost always scoped late – after the asset is committed, sometimes after it’s energised – by which point the small pool of capable traders ahs already been picked over.
Where this is showing up in our own mandates
We’ve seen this split trace through our own work over the past several months. Across roughly a dozen explicitly battery, BESS and storage-titled roles we’ve handled – clustered heavily from late 2025 into 2026, with around five briefed in the first four months of 2026 alone – the spread runs almost exactly along the two-workforce line.
At the leadership end, there’s a Director of BESS and a Head of Development for renewables and BESS. On the physical side, a Contracts Manager, a Site Manager and a BESS Commissioning Engineer. And on the market side, a Battery Trade – alongside a separate Physical Markets Trader. One asset class, two candidate markets that barely intersect. The clearest illustration is the pairing we’ve worked most recently: a commissioning engineer and a trade, both “battery” hires, with effectively no overlap in background, sourcing channel or assessment criteria.
The geography is worth nothing too: our battery mandates cluster on the eastern seaboard – Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales – even though much of the recent headline coverage has centred on Western Australia’s grid. The NEM build is where the eastern-states hiring pressure is concentrating.
What this means if you’re planning a battery workforce
The practical takeaway is to scope both workforces at the same time, not in sequence. The build team and the trading desk run on different clocks – the build team mobilises and demobilises around construction, while the desk needs to be in place and competent before the asset starts earning. Treating the trader as something you’ll sort out closer to commercial operation is how assets go live without anyone optimised to run them.
It also means accepting that you’re sourcing from two different markets with two different strategies. The commissioning and contracts talent comes from EPC, transmission and renewables delivery. The trading and analysis talent comes from energy markets, retail and commodities. A single “battery hiring plan” that assumes one funnel will quietly underperform on the half it understands least – almost always the desk.
If you’re building a battery workforce
If you’re scoping a grid-scale battery and want a confidential conversation about how the build team and the trading desk differ – and where the candidates actually come from – talk to our team at Talesca. We run permanent, contractor and executive search across energy storage, generation and the wider energy transition, and we’d be glad to compare notes on what your project will actually need to hire.
Frequently Asked Questions
A battery is built and then run as two separate activities. The build needs commissioning engineers, site managers and contracts specialists to energise and integrate the asset. Running it is a commercial activity: buying cheap daytime energy and selling it into the evening peak. In Q1 2026, energy arbitrage made up 97% of NEM battery storage revenue, so the trading function is central to the asset’s returns, not a back-office afterthought.
On the physical side: BESS commissioning engineers, site managers, contracts managers and quality engineers, plus leadership roles like Director of BESS or Head of Development. On the market side: battery traders and energy-market analysts who run the asset’s charge-and-discharge strategy once it’s live. The two groups come from almost entirely different talent pools.
Largely, yes. Around 74% of batteries in the NEM pipeline use grid-forming inverters, which actively maintain grid voltage and frequency rather than simply following the grid. Proving that capability through hold-point testing and AEMO registration is a specialised skill, and the pool of engineers who’ve done it on grid-scale BESS is narrow and tightening as the pipeline grows.
The skill set sits closer to a financial trading desk than an engineering team — it overlaps with merchant power trading, commodities and quantitative analysis. The candidate pool is small and is being competed for by retailers, trading houses and developers’ own merchant desks. Because the role is often scoped late, employers reach the market after the strongest candidates have already moved.
Scope both workforces at the start, not in sequence. The build team mobilises around construction and commissioning. The trading desk needs to be in place and competent before the asset starts earning revenue, which in practice means recruiting the market-side roles earlier than most plans assume.
The eastern-seaboard NEM states – Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales – are where the connection pipeline and commissioning activity are concentrating hiring. Western Australia’s separate grid has its own significant build, but the bulk of NEM-driven demand sits in the east.
Sources & references
- ABC News, “How the west charged ahead in the mega battery race” (28 May 2026) – https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-28/australia-global-battery-leader-and-wa-leads-charge/106526042
- AEMO, Quarterly Energy Dynamics Q1 2026 (April 2026) – https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/qed/2026/qed-q1-2026.pdf (arbitrage, price-setting, evening-peak data; primary source)
- AEMO media release, “Renewables lift supply share as batteries re-shape energy markets” (30 April 2026) — https://www.aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-release/renewables-lift-supply-share-as-batteries-re-shape-energy-markets
- AEMO Connections Scorecard data, reported via Energy-Storage.news, “Grid-forming inverters feature in 74% of Australia’s 33.2GW NEM battery storage pipeline” (24 April 2026) — https://www.energy-storage.news/grid-forming-inverters-feature-in-74-of-australias-33-2gw-nem-battery-storage-pipeline/
- Energy-Storage.news, “Australia’s battery storage fleet triples daily load-shifting as 4.4GW comes online in Q1 2026, says AEMO” (30 April 2026) — https://www.energy-storage.news/australias-battery-storage-fleet-triples-daily-load-shifting-as-4-4gw-comes-online-in-q1-2026-says-aemo/
- Ember, Global Electricity Review 2026 (April 2026) — https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/ (Background on batteries shifting >50% of new solar generation in Australia; not cited in the body, available if you want to add the global-context framing.)