Solar installations, home batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicles are changing energy flows within private households. For utilities, this creates a new strategic opportunity: integrating decentralised assets into the energy system and unlocking the commercial value of their flexibility.
In a new guest article published by HEMS Finder, Thies Stillahn, Head of Sales DACH at exnaton, and Wilhelm Appler, Co-Founder of clever-PV, examine how utilities can begin building the necessary capabilities.
As smart meter adoption accelerates, consumption and feed-in volumes are increasingly measured and balanced at 15-minute intervals. At the same time, solar installations, batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicles are creating new load and generation patterns that conventional standard load profiles cannot adequately represent.
This increases the demands placed on procurement forecasting, balancing-group management and tariff design. It also gives utilities new opportunities to integrate flexible household assets into innovative energy products.
Data from Home Energy Management Systems, or HEMS, can help utilities forecast consumption and feed-in more accurately, coordinate decentralised assets and eventually unlock new revenue opportunities.
Technical controllability alone is not enough. To turn household flexibility into a scalable business model, utilities need several foundations:
The guest article also presents a step-by-step path into the market—from improving procurement and balancing-group forecasts to small-scale direct marketing and, ultimately, trading aggregated flexibility on the intraday market.
This approach allows utilities to generate initial operational value while establishing the foundations for future flexibility products.
The authors explore the available options and explain why utilities should begin building their flexibility capabilities now in the full German-language guest article:
Flexibilitätsvermarktung von Haushaltskunden: Warum Stadtwerke jetzt handeln sollten.
