E.ON launches digital business to manage grid complexity

Germany-based electric utility company E.ON has launched a subsidiary, E.ON One, in a digitalisation push.

With the new company, E.ON aims to bring together digital solutions for utilities to enable the energy sector to make grids smart and allow energy consumption to become more sustainable.

Victoria Ossadnik, member of the E.ON board of management responsible for digitalisation, said regarding the new company: “The energy transition is more urgent than ever and digital solutions are one of the main answers to the growing complexity of the energy system. Millions of households, their appliances and businesses need to be connected to the power grid in an increasingly decentralised energy system.

“E.ON One supports our customers on this journey and can draw on a portfolio of digital solutions from leading scale-ups and E.ON built solutions that have already been successfully deployed on a large scale in Germany and Europe.”

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According to E.ON, the new company will help distribution grid operators with the digital transformation by providing a digital twin of the grid with their technology. They will also support energy retailers, Stadtwerke, renewable energy providers and e-mobility operators with connecting and coordinating their decentral energy resource assets.

For this reason, E.ON One also includes the two scale-ups gridX and envelio, in each of which E.ON holds a majority stake.

The new company focuses on three business areas:

1. Against a background of many grid connection requests, the energy flows in the grid must be kept in balance. With the enormous number of decentralised energy generators, electric cars and heat pumps, this represents a major challenge and leads to the second business area;
2. Operation of energy networks. With increasing volatility in the grid from renewables, a stable and reliable operation of distribution grids is more important than ever. “To solve this problem, E.ON One has developed Brightfield, a data acquisition system which provides real time visibility on transformer stations”, explained Tim van Amstel, who manages the E.ON subsidiary together with Stefan Huppertz and Marco Rummer.
3. Energy management solutions: E.ON One offers a set of solutions that provides customers more transparency about their consumption and aims to optimise consumption and generation automatically. The company will also provide customers with digitisation modules and upgrades that help to save energy, stabilise grid operations or move energy consumption to a less critical time (otherwise known as peak shaving).