Managing 10,000 renewable power plants with 20 employees instead of 60

The challenge: Increasing complexity in a dynamic market

By 2030, the energy landscape will change dramatically: at that point, power will be generated primarily from renewable sources and through a distributed network of small plants. According to the plans for newly installed capacity, in the next few years Germany will see the construction of over 40,000 power plants with more than 2 megawatts (MW) of capacity and over 1.1 million plants under 2 MW. This poses challenges for energy companies: growing numbers of customers and power plants mean new market models, changing customer needs, and an increasingly smaller scale of operations, all of which have to remain workable and manageable.

That’s why since 2018, EnBW has been relying on a platform that reduces this complexity. “Even at these scales, virtual power plants make it possible to simply collect energy from plants, optimize it, and deliver it to energy exchanges,” says Marc Schütt, Head of EnBW’s Virtual Power Plant. Founded as an independent start-up, the EnBW Virtual Power Plant is intended to be equally available to plant operators and partners—mostly large project developers or financial companies. Everyone should be able to participate in the Virtual Power Plant—regardless of plant size, plant type, or the installed technology. “This requires an open IT architecture. At the same time, the market segment and legal requirements are extremely dynamic, and margins are thinning,” Schütt says, “so we need a platform that not only provides IT services, but can also map all the value-added steps of our customer process automatically. In short, we need an extremely flexible system that lets us implement this business model in a way that makes commercial sense. And that’s what Microsoft Azure offers.” This led to the decision to set up the Virtual Power Plant as “cloud-only” right from the start—the first business unit within the group to do so. “By moving to a serverless architecture, we were able to achieve tremendous gains in speed. That’s what clinched it for us,” says Tobias Lindner, Head of IT at EnBW’s Virtual Power Plant. “Additionally, Azure Logic Apps, now a core component of our solution, were already very advanced at that time with their graphical interface for workflows. So Azure was a perfect fit for us.”

The solution: Automating customer processes with Microsoft Azure ensures profitability

Currently, the Virtual Power Plant’s approximately 10,000 plants generate around 5 gigawatts (GW) of power from renewable sources. This figure is roughly equivalent to the output of five coal-fired power plants—and it’s rising. The Azure cloud platform’s automated workflows ensure that management and processing, from creating offers to billing, remains easy. Interested parties create offers for their direct marketing contracts themselves via the platform. As soon as a new request is registered or a new offer is created, Azure Event Grid comes into play. Dispatch of the offer and the contract between EnBW and the end customer is fully automated and digital, for example via Exchange Online. In this way, the master data of each plant can also be transmitted digitally for grid registration. All communication among the platform’s IT services as well as between the platform and internal and external partners takes place via Azure API Management. For example, data is collected to create an individual output forecast for each plant, taking into account weather data and other parameters. This is because EnBW must be able to provide information at any time about the amount of power it expects to supply to the overall grid. For long-running, more extensive processes of this kind, the EnBW team relies on Azure Durable Functions. Azure Logic Apps take care of orchestration while Azure Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Database handle data processing and storage. After the power has been delivered and sold on the exchange, customers automatically receive their invoice from the platform.

The cloud solution pays off for customers as well: they can create direct marketing contracts in about four minutes. “If you’ve created your own offer, you’ll always know where you are in the process and you’ll be able to clear things up yourself in cases where you’re not sure,” Schütt says. “Today, customers want changes to, say, their master data to be visible in the system immediately. That’s why we rely on customer self-service with automatic data verification instead of email and phone calls. This enables us to meet the needs of our customers in the best way possible.” Partners benefit too: they receive an individually branded turnkey solution with which they can serve their end customers and orchestrate governance processes and user authorizations themselves.

“The Virtual Power Plant is only just beginning to open up its possibilities. We can now easily dock new energy-related services or technologies such as batteries onto our platform at any time,” Schütt says. That means EnBW’s Virtual Power Plant will be able to continue driving forward Germany’s energy transition in the future.