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Joulen
Case study

Smart EV Charging Platform

Joulen acted as Virtual Trade Partner, giving a smart EV charging platform's aggregated flexibility a direct route into GB wholesale markets, a new revenue stream from assets already deployed.

EV charger, charging EV and battery storage
The outcome
£7M
Expected incremental annual revenue
60 MW+
Flexible charging capacity in market
4 weeks
To an established route to market
A leading smart EV charging platformSmart EV charging · GB wholesale

Challenge

The platform had already solved the hard consumer-facing problem: intelligently scheduling EV charging around price and carbon signals, across a large and growing base of connected drivers and chargers. That gave them a genuinely valuable pool of flexible demand.

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 consumer EV 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 flexibility was a largely untapped asset: valuable in theory, but not converting into revenue.

Approach

Joulen became the platform's Virtual Trade Partner, acting as their licensed route into the GB wholesale markets, so their 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 assets 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 EV charging platform kept full ownership of the driver relationship and the charging 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 driver-facing product while Joulen handled market access, forecasting, and trading.

  • [£7M incremental revenue] expected to be generated annually from wholesale market trading of aggregated EV charging flexibility
  • [Over 60MW] of flexible charging capacity brought into active market participation
  • Route to market established in [4 weeks], without the platform needing to build its own trading desk or hold market licences
  • [X%] improvement in the value captured per unit of flexibility versus running charging optimisation alone

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