Software for renewable energy communities

How does your software bring consumers and producers of renewable electricity together?

Our app ¡°PowerQuartier¡± accompanies households and businesses in the energy transition, providing insights into their consumption, and showing them how photovoltaics reduce energy bills. Our flagship service is a ¡°Neighbourhood Power¡± exchange, allowing an electricity-producing household to sell any surpluses to surrounding households. In fact, electricity producers can usually only use 30% of the self-generated electricity, as photovoltaics produce electricity during the day while most electricity is consumed at night. Storing electricity in battery storage systems remains expensive and injecting it into the grid is unprofitable.

Selling surplus electricity in the neighbourhood offers a perfect solution and is beneficial for both parties. Buyers can use locally generated, sustainable electricity, and sellers don¡¯t have to worry about surplus electricity, which allows them to amortise their investment in photovoltaic systems faster. Both, buyers and sellers participate in the local energy community via the PowerQuartier app that shows energy data and generation sources. For example, on sunny days, users can see that the local photovoltaic system covers the whole community¡¯s electricity demand. On rainy days, you see how much electricity the regional energy supplier is delivering to the community.

Funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the concept was first tested in Switzerland in the Quartierstrom research project at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen (see box). Based on initial results, a software platform has been developed ¨C including the PowerQuartier app - which processes electricity trading in real-time.

Our smart algorithms compute transactions between users, manage the billing for utility companies, and provide visual data for end-consumers. Using energy data collected with smart-metering technology (see box), the software requires no additional hardware. Since the smart-meter technology is currently being rolled out all over Switzerland and Europe, our platform can scale fast. We sell the software to utilities and they offer the community service to their customers. The app can be branded with the utility¡¯s corporate identity, thus enabling it to open up new customer channels and strengthen current customer relationships.

Is the technology already in use? When will people benefit from your solution?

Yes, it is. Despite Exnaton only being founded in 2020, we have already deployed the software with the first paying customers in Switzerland and Austria. First users already have access to the PowerQuartier app. So far, feedback is very positive. The app is being used extensively ¨C in fact, 9 out of 10 users would recommend it to their friends, family, and neighbours - they find it easy and fun to use.

What are your plans for the future?

We have ambitious sales targets for 2021 and 2022. To that end, we are currently establishing a strong network and are reaching out to several utilities throughout Europe. While we are waiting for the last regulatory adjustments for energy communities in Switzerland and the European Union, we are targeting leading renewable energy markets such as Austria, where a new law for energy communities will hopefully go live by the summer of 2021. To reach our goals, we are always looking for talents to join our great team.