Startup Chat: Powering Flexibility for the Grid of Tomorrow

Governments are pushing for greener energy, but this transition comes with pressure on electricity grids. Grids, which have increasing demand, love stability, so balance and control, and renewables aren’t stable, as they rely on natural resources that can’t be controlled. This means the grid needs flexibility to adapt to the new irregular renewable generation, rising demand and disruptions in real time. As renewables grow, so does the role of prosumers, energy consumers who also produce energy, mostly through solar panels, and sell excess energy back to the grid. The Distributed Energy Resources-prosumer tech market is estimated to be valued at around 90 billion dollars, a number expected to grow to almost 300 in 2034, according to Precedence Research. This two-way grid model is taking shape in places like the UK, where the government has included Vehicle-to-Grid, where EVs can return unused electricity to the grid, in its smart charging and energy flexibility strategies. With these new needs, digital tools are a must, and we’ve seen it. 2025 brought a trend of energy-tech firms securing capital to build flexibility, asset-aggregation and Virtual Power Plant platforms, which are platforms that coordinate and control many small energy resources so they work as a single power plant. One of the startups that secured funding was Belgian LIFEPOWR, which raised almost 6 million to accelerate their virtual power plant platform that digitally coordinates solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, and others. We spoke to the company's CEO and founder, Dries Bols, to discuss the market, the role of startups in it, and business model examples. We've seen a lot of traction these past few years with renewables. With that came the need for balancing and the people who were active in the markets with balancing services, they were having a lot of opportunities basically. So there were a lot of good economic stories out there of people earning money from bringing their flexibility into the market. And I think that word of mouth or that message has spread. There's a lot of awareness about that now, and that's causing a lot of traction. And with all this context Dries, in this market who do you focus on? It's a prosumer. So that's someone who has their own production, for example, solar panels, a storage, either battery system, a chargepoint EV, so where we can, consider these multi assets flexibility and where we valorize their position in the markets. Prosumers are a regular resident that has solar panels, for example. So what business model do you have to reach them in this market that relies so much on people to help make the grid flexible? Well, we have a B2B2C strategy in Belgium and a pure B2B strategy outside of Belgium. That means that we work with channel partners. So we do not address these potential users of technology ourselves. We are merely the technology provider towards partners that are reselling it in the markets. Installers, for example, of batteries. And they're indeed, they're making this part of their pitch. We've seen a growth in this market, and the investment in startups makes it quite clear. What do you think brought investors to it? And what did you learn from your latest funding round? Looking more at the technology and the products, it's not easy, what we do is very complicated, but everybody sees this market evolving. A lot of flexibility is needed in our system. Maybe learning number one. It always takes longer than you think. Than you anticipate at the beginning. So also for us, I would say initial timeline was much shorter than what it eventually turned out to be. And learnings for the future. I think given the complexity, there might be a lot more documentation we can prepare. Grid flexibility solutions like virtual power plants won't prevent large scale outages, but they can add a layer of responsiveness that modern grids increasingly need. By shifting consumption, injecting power when required, and managing energy more locally. These platforms could play a growing role as electrification accelerates and energy systems become more decentralized and volatile.