Large European Utilities Aggressively Enter New Energy Services By Gobbling Up Startups
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July 3, 2017Companies facing disruption from RE
European utilities have been the first utilities to face disruption from renewable energy with many of them seeing their share prices and earnings plummet, with renewable energy penetration ramping up rapidly in many of the European countries like Germany, Denmark, Spain, UK etc. These companies realize the danger to the traditional utility business model from disruption not only in the distributed green energy but also from storage, EVs and other technologies.
They are now aggressively moving into providing energy management services to their customers as plain vanilla electricity supply is no longer an essential service required by customers, many of whom are shifting completely off the grid with solar energy plus storage systems.
Italian energy utility giant Enel, which has long been in the large scale renewable energy generation business is moving aggressively into – “electric mobility, vehicle-to-grid projects, recharging infrastructure, energy-efficiency management, batteries and energy optimization platforms, public lighting and distributed generation systems.”
Read more about the other energy efficiency company, Tesla
The company has also bought the biggest energy demand response player EnerNoc of USA for a huge premium as it wants to utilize its expertise and software which it has developed over the years. The other big demand response company Comverage has also been bought by another European energy player Itron who wants to merge DR with its smart meter and network offerings.
Enel Green Power North America, Inc. (“EGPNA”), an Enel Group subsidiary, has signed an agreement, unanimously approved by the board of directors of US-based company EnerNOC (Nasdaq: ENOC), to purchase 100% of EnerNOC for a total consideration of approximately 250 million US dollars1. EnerNOC is a US-based leading provider of demand response and energy services for utility, commercial, institutional and industrial customers. The acquisition of EnerNOC will make the Enel Group a global leader in demand response services while bringing EnerNOC’s energy management technology and services to Enel’s existing commercial and industrial customers.