Interview with Jochen Schwill, founder of SpotmyEnergy. Next Kraftwerke is one of Europe’s largest virtual power plants. Now, with SpotmyEnergy, he aims to simplify access to flexible tariffs for prosumers.
What makes your start-up SpotmyEnergy, founded in 2023, stand out?
We interconnect cars, EV-chargers, heat pumps and small residential battery storage systems. There is vast untapped potential here that we want to integrate into the energy system. Our solution includes a smart meter, an energy management system and a dynamic electricity supply contract. This allows us to measure the time and quantity of electricity consumption, the energy management system controls devices, and the electricity supply contract is the basis for invoicing. This enables consumers to respond flexibly, for example by charging their car at a low price at night, when there is a lot of wind energy available. Our algorithm determines the optimal charging time.
Yes, we need these tariffs to respond to the expansion of renewables. We expect more than 200 GW of photovoltaic power to be deployed by 2030. During peak feed-in times, this will be around three times as much as the total German consumption during the summer. We must manage to shift consumption to times of peak generation while trying to even out peak demand times. According to forecasts, around 40 percent of households will be using such tariffs by then. Next Kraftwerke was founded around 15 years ago.
We want to understand houses and the people who live in them, in a way that is similar to what large American tech companies do with mobile devices. This will allow us to heat up the house just before people get home or charge the car in time for when they leave. This will take into consideration times of high insolation and the inflow of photovoltaic electrodes into the house – all based on artificial intelligence.