Enpal, Entrix announce Europe’s largest virtual power plant

Enpal, a German residential solar installer which specializes in the sale and rental of PV systems and associated system components, and Entrix, a provider of optimization and trading platform for energy storage, have joined forces under the Flexa brand to build what they call Europe’s largest virtual power plant (VPP).

Enpal, which holds the majority of shares in their joint venture company, said in a statement that the aim is to deliver several gigawatts of power “in just a few years.” No more information was provided on the timetable, the planned area of ​​the activities, or the possible number of interconnected systems.

Entrix will contribute to the project with its propriatery, AI-based electricity trading platform, which can be used to manage perform electricity trading as well as control supply to the grid. Enpal brings “its extensive network of decentralized solar systems, energy storage systems, heat pumps and wall boxes as well as its experience in operating virtual power plants” to the project. An important element here is the company’s energy management system “Enpal.One” .

Idea behind the VPP

The VPP is intended to control the electricity production, storage and consumption of the participating households and to trade available surpluses on the electricity market. This is intended to bring participants – as is generally the aim of VPPs – cost savings through cheap procurement as well as revenues from electricity trading. Grid-friendly services such as frequency control, voltage maintenance or the provision of capacity reserves are also planned as a source of revenue.

Flexa’s chief technology officer is Sébastien Schikora, who reportedly already headed the digital product development of Tesla’s global stationary batteries and Powerwalls for the US company’s VPPs. Vjekoslav Salapic, co-founder and head of product development at Flexa, was responsible for the development of VPPs at energy management system provider GridX.

From pv magazine Germany