Germany Stops Leaving Clean Energy on the Table

Kraken and enercity are pooling distributed energy assets into one virtual power plant for Germany's wholesale markets

9 Jun 2026

Kraken, a UK-based energy software provider, and Hanover utility enercity announced on 5 June 2026 a partnership to build a virtual power plant (VPP), a digital system that coordinates decentralised energy assets as a single unit for participation in German wholesale and balancing markets.

The partnership addresses a structural gap. Rooftop solar installations, battery storage units, combined heat-and-power systems, and controllable industrial loads have largely been excluded from Germany's short-term energy trading and grid balancing mechanisms. Legacy IT infrastructure, fragmented across operators, has left substantial distributed capacity sitting outside those markets entirely.

Kraken contributes the software layer: automated asset onboarding, real-time optimisation, and access to European balancing mechanisms. For its part, enercity brings a broad portfolio of electricity and heat generation assets, providing the operational depth needed to make the model commercially viable at launch.

"As renewable build-out picks up pace across Europe, the challenge facing us today is one of coordination, not capacity," said Charlotte Johnson, General Manager of Flexibility at Kraken. "By orchestrating distributed assets as a single, intelligent system, Kraken balances the grid and enables better use of cheap, abundant, clean energy."

Jean-Baptiste Cornefert, Head of Trading and Energy Markets at enercity, described a platform capable of deciding in real time whether electricity should be traded directly, stored, or converted into thermal energy through power-to-heat, the mechanism he identified as central to managing market volatility.

Sector coupling, the integration of electricity and heat systems into a single coordinated flow, sits at the core of enercity's commercial rationale. Profitability monitoring and full market access are included across the value chain.

Germany's distributed energy base is expanding faster than existing infrastructure can manage. Demand for digital orchestration tools is rising alongside it, and both companies are positioning the VPP as a commercial answer to that growing gap.