Software-only PV aggregation: Youdera's route to flexible fleets

Youdera is a Switzerland-based asset manager, helping European businesses reduce energy risk through holistic energy management and financed on-site infrastructure, including solar, batteries, building envelope upgrades, and process electrification.

Operating across Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal, Youdera uses proprietary technology designed to originate, operate, and manage distributed solar PV systems at scale.

With Synergi, Youdera has been exploring new remote control capabilities for the residential portfolio fleets it manages on behalf of customers across Switzerland. The goal of the collaboration is to transform these portfolios from passive solar generation into active, VPP-ready flexible assets.

To achieve this, Synergi developed a cloud-to-cloud, API-first solution that enables remote control of inverters across multiple brands. This gives solar asset managers like Youdera a second option for making PV assets controllable, useful wherever a hardware retrofit would be slower or more costly to roll out.

With Synergi's solution, sites are onboarded remotely and aggregated into a single controllable portfolio using Synergi's technical aggregation capabilities. Once aggregated, the fleet can be dispatched to clients' own trading desks via API or MQTT, with sub-minute latency, enabling participation in ancillary service markets.

For Youdera, this means better asset economics. For the wider grid, it means distributed solar that can respond when the system needs it most.

“Due to the rapid growth of PV solar, Europe now has a massive installed base of residential and C&I solar systems that do not respond to grid needs. Our job at Synergi is to deliver a software-only approach to controlling distributed energy assets without requiring additional hardware retrofits, providing an immediate solution for segments where a hardware-based approach is too costly”, says Antti Hämmäinen, CEO and co-founder of Synergi.

“Our collaboration with Youdera enables us to continue developing solutions that serve as an alternative to more common and traditional solar asset management solutions, benefiting both solar asset managers, utilities and the grid.

"Collaborating with Synergi allows us to connect our pool of residential solar assets and unlock their flexibility potential. Simple to implement and without requiring any additional hardware, this partnership helps us improve the performance of our assets while providing services that support grid stability," says Juanra Sánchez, CMO of Youdera.

If you're a European solar asset manager interested in exploring a software-only approach to remote control for your customers' solar portfolios, get in touch below.