Europe’s energy landscape was built to manage fossil-fuel based systems, like coal, oil and natural gas. The foundational logic was simple: whether it was a scorching day in July or a bitter winter night, traditional power plants could ramp production up or down as needed to meet demand.
The move away from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources like wind and solar in recent years has disrupted this logic; you can’t just dial the sun up or down depending on demand. This changes how energy systems must operate.
“The world’s vying to increase renewable energy supply on the grid, but the problem is that most of these new renewables are intermittent. So energy supply is more volatile; pricing is more volatile. This is a massive problem to solve,” Will Dufton, principal at VC firm Giant Ventures, told Sifted’s Intelligence team in a recent Pro briefing on energy management tools.
Across Europe, a lot of startups have popped up developing sophisticated software solutions to address the challenge, working on such things as household energy management to grid-level planning.
“There are parts of the market that are relatively crowded,” Nick de la Forge, founder and general partner at Planet A Ventures, tells Sifted — with software for household energy efficiency the main culprit.
But, as de la Forge points out, what startups have going for them is that “energy is extremely price sensitive. So if somebody is seemingly able to overperform in terms of price, then this will make customers change over time.
“‘I think there’ll be some clear winners over time,” de la Forge says.
To find out who those winners might be, Sifted mapped Europe’s energy management software startups, organising them by the types of customers they serve — from individual households and large-scale utilities to grid operators.
If we’ve missed an area of energy management software or any companies off the list, let us know.
1. Software for customers to manage their home energy assets
These startups, which often provide app-based platforms, help individuals manage their smart appliances — including heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles.
They use price volatility to their advantage by offering customers the cheapest available electricity per hour.
Førde, Norway-based Tibber is the most well capitalised company, and has raised $177m across four rounds since 2019.
Smaller players serving customers in similar ways include Hamburg, Germany-based Rabot Energy, Cologne, Germany-based Spotmyenergy, Berlin-based Ostrom and Stockholm-based Greenley.
2. Software for businesses to manage their energy assets
These startups help businesses procure renewable energy sources, provide insights about the business’s energy usage and its compliance with regulations and help SMEs band together to gain access to cheaper renewable energy. Within this sector startups are working on a couple of things:
Software helping businesses procure and manage energy supplies
- London-based Tem matches companies looking to procure green energy and renewable energy asset owners. The platform also handles invoicing and payment.
- Berlin-based Trawa helps SMEs with their purchase and management of green electricity.
- Berlin-based Onu.energy automates energy procurement and management processes — like budgeting, hedging, investments and consumption management — for businesses.
- Munich, Germany-based Ecoplanet helps companies reduce costs and carbon dioxide emissions via its AI-driven platform Ember, which tracks such things.
Software helping businesses buy and sell energy
- Copenhagen-based Reel provides a platform for SMEs to identify what wind and solar energy to purchase and then matches them with other SMEs to buy energy more cheaply as a single entity via a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA).
- Amsterdam-based Sympower partners with companies using a significant amount of energy to help them monetise their flexible energy assets by selling their flexibility across European energy markets.
- Paris-based Granular helps companies track and trade clean energy. By showing what the real-time cost of green electricity is, it can be priced accurately and so incentivise green flexible power.
3. Software for utility companies and energy asset owners
There’s a cohort of startups providing B2B software to energy companies: either utility companies that provide power to customers, or those that manage large-energy assets such as batteries and solar parks. Startups in this sector are also working in a couple of areas:
Software to connect flexible energy assets to the grid
These are startups that help energy companies to connect flexible assets to their energy system, be it EV chargers, heat pumps or batteries. These include London-based Axle Energy, Stockholm-based Plexigrid and Flower and Vienna-based Podero.
Software to manage the energy assets
To transition to renewable energy, we need to install a whole load of batteries in energy assets to keep power running when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Startups working on software specifically focused on battery management include:
- Aachen, Germany-based Accure, which uses AI to analyse and monitor battery health.
- Berlin-based Terra One, which develops AI models to automatically control battery storage systems.
There are also companies working on software to help manage utility companies to manage the wires and cables of the energy system too:
- Amsterdam-based Overstory helps utility companies know when they need to trim vegetation to prevent wildfires, caused when trees and cables tangle together.
And some use AI to make the operations of energy assets more efficient. Bristol, UK-based Beam automates offshore wind-farming operations — from the engineering and construction to the maintenance and performance of the infrastructure.
Software to help energy retailers price their energy
There are startups making software to provide energy companies with real-time information to develop competitive prices for their energy. These include:
- Antwerp, Belgium-based Gorilla provides energy retailers with data to know how to price their energy in the volatile energy market.
- London-based Kraken licenses its software to other energy companies. Its operating systems include Kraken Customer, which supports energy companies’ customer service, Kraken Asset, which helps them with asset management and Kraken Field, which helps with maintenance. Kraken’s latest accounts show a near six-fold increase in profits.
4. Software providing market intelligence for energy traders
Increasingly startups are addressing the gap between the renewable energy sector and financial markets, helping traders and investors manage their portfolio, and providing insights to insurance brokers and reinsurers. Energy market intelligence platforms include:
- Munich, Germany-based Luxera Energy offers an investment platform that covers the whole value chain for battery energy storage systems.
- London-based Renew Risk is a risk modelling platform that helps financers understand how physical risks might affect their investments into renewable energy assets. Last week it raised £5m in funding led by Molten Ventures.
- London-based LCP Energy’s Enact is a data integration and analytics platform designed for European short-term power markets.
5. Software to help grid planning
The energy grid needs expanding as renewable power generation increases and the AI boom leads to more and more energy guzzling data centres being built.
The startups working on software solutions for grid planning are targeting customers such as energy companies, land development bodies and individuals.
They help those stakeholders answer questions like: where should this infrastructure be plotted? What type of development will get the best bang for my buck? Should I buy grid space elsewhere? De la Fosse says grid expansion and renovation is an underfunded space.
Some early players are targeting specific industries:
- Berlin-based Puls8 provides software to collaboratively model green hydrogen projects.
- Berlin-based Caeli Wind offers software for wind farming developers to better economically and spatially plan their projects.
Others, like Edinburgh, UK-based Continuum Industries, provide software to plan infrastructure developments for all energy infrastructure planning.
Download the full list of energy software startups powering Europe’s green transition
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/the-energy-software-startups-powering-europes-green-transition/
