Home Solar & Battery Platform
Joulen acted as Virtual Trade Partner for a home energy optimisation platform, trading the aggregated flexibility of thousands of home batteries into GB wholesale markets.
- £5M
- Incremental annual revenue
- 10,000+
- Homes' battery capacity in market
- 6 weeks
- To an established route to market
Challenge
The platform had already solved the hard consumer-facing problem: automatically optimising when each home's battery charges, discharges, or exports, refreshing that decision every few minutes across a large and growing base of connected solar and battery systems. That gave them a genuinely valuable pool of flexible, dispatchable capacity.
What they didn't have was a route to trade that flexibility directly in Great Britain's wholesale electricity markets. Participating in wholesale, balancing, and ancillary markets requires trading infrastructure, licensing, and market access that sit well outside a home energy app's core business; building and running that capability in-house would have meant significant regulatory overhead, capital investment, and time to market, all as a distraction from their core product.
Without a route to market, their aggregated fleet of home batteries was a largely untapped asset: valuable in theory, but not converting fully into revenue for the platform or its customers.
Approach
Joulen became the platform's Virtual Trade Partner, acting as their licensed route into the GB wholesale markets, so their aggregated home battery flexibility could be traded without them needing to build or hold that infrastructure themselves.
- Forecast: market prices and the platform's available flexible capacity at granular (15-minute) resolution, so trading decisions were based on an accurate, live picture of what the aggregated home battery fleet could actually deliver.
- Optimise: how and when to trade that flexibility, using a decision engine designed to maximise the value captured from wholesale price movements and market opportunities.
- Execute: the resulting trades and dispatch control on the platform's behalf, converting optimised strategies into real, settled market activity.
The result was a plug-in route to market: the home energy platform kept full ownership of the homeowner relationship and the in-app optimisation experience, while Joulen handled the trading relationship, market access, and day-to-day execution required to monetise the underlying flexibility.
Results
Partnering with Joulen as their VTP gave the platform a fast, low-risk route to a revenue stream that was previously out of reach, and let them stay focused on the homeowner-facing product while Joulen handled market access, forecasting, and trading.
- [£5M incremental revenue] generated annually from wholesale market trading of aggregated home solar and battery flexibility
- [Over 10,000 homes'] worth of flexible battery capacity brought into active market participation
- Route to market established in [6 weeks], without the platform needing to build its own trading desk or hold market licences
- Additional flexibility income passed through to homeowners, strengthening the platform's own savings and earnings proposition to its customers
