Sympower: How the Netherlands Solved a Grid Flexibility Problem the U.S. Still Hasn’t Cracked

For decades, U.S. grid operators have faced the same bottleneck: renewable energy is growing fast, but the system’s ability to manage its volatility and maintain real-time balance is not.

Despite massive public and private investment in storage, transmission, and smart meter deployments, America still lacks a working model that treats demand-side flexibility as dispatchable infrastructure.

Europe, however, may be a few steps ahead — and one Dutch company is quietly demonstrating how.

Sympower, founded in 2015 and based in Amsterdam, doesn’t generate power or build infrastructure. Instead, it specializes in transforming commercial loads, batteries, and renewable assets into dispatchable grid resources. Today, it operates in ten European countries, managing over 2.5 GW of flexible capacity — making it one of the most sophisticated distributed flexibility platforms in the region.

In late 2024, Sympower closed a €21.3 million Series B1 round led by A&G Energy Transition Tech Fund and the European Investment Fund (EIF). But more than just capital, this round signals something larger: flexibility is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s core infrastructure for the energy system of the future.

The Founding Team: A Systems Approach to the Flexibility Problem

CEO and founder Simon Bushell studied energy systems at Cambridge and Imperial College London. His early work focused on climate models and grid interoperability, but what stood out was his conviction: the energy transition would stall unless control layers evolved alongside generation.

“We’ve treated flexibility as a bonus feature,” Bushell says. “But it’s actually the backbone of the system.”

Bushell positioned Sympower not as a hardware company or an aggregator, but as a grid-level signal layer — a control and coordination platform that could translate distributed behavior into dispatchable action.

In 2024, Sympower brought on Bo Kristensen, former CTO of green shipping software company ZeroNorth, to scale its automation, storage integration, and AI-driven orchestration logic.

Business Model: Not About Saving Energy — But Selling Control

Sympower doesn’t sell energy savings — it monetizes control. Its platform connects directly with large commercial users, storage operators, and renewables assets to modulate usage, manage intermittency, and generate grid value.

That value is captured through market participation — frequency response, balancing markets, and capacity reserve auctions — and shared with the client. In other words, flexibility becomes a revenue stream, not just a cost avoidance measure.

The platform is structured around three core modules:

1. Industrial Demand Response

Sympower integrates directly with industrial systems — from factories to data centers — enabling millisecond-level automated load control with minimal disruption.

2. Battery Aggregation & Control

Following its acquisition of Nordic flexibility company Flextools, Sympower expanded into fleet-level battery orchestration and dynamic storage dispatch.

3. Renewables Dispatch & Market Optimization

Sympower increasingly supports wind, solar, and hybrid operators in optimizing bids, mitigating curtailments, and maximizing market participation.

Why This Matters: A Structural Alternative to the U.S. Playbook

Sympower’s model offers a direct contrast to two of the best-known U.S. players in this space:

• Voltus operates like a high-speed aggregator, quickly pooling flexible loads into U.S. markets like PJM and ERCOT. But its depth of integration is limited, and its business model is highly sensitive to market rule changes and incentives.

• Virtual Peaker focuses on utility-side SaaS tools for managing residential and community energy — a lighter, front-end focused platform with limited market participation capabilities.

By contrast, Sympower operates as a deep platform layer, with end-to-end control across assets, data, markets, and revenue streams. Its advantage lies in:

• Control granularity aligned with grid operator needs;

• Real-time response capabilities fit for frequency markets;

• A full-stack model that combines data ingestion, control execution, and market monetization.

In an EU context — where countries are rapidly opening flexibility markets and rolling out dynamic tariffs — Sympower is increasingly viewed as the default interface for “system-level dispatchability” in a distributed world.

Valuation and Investor Logic: Why This Platform Deserves a Premium

Sympower has not disclosed its current valuation, but comparable platforms in Europe typically fall within:

• €3–5M per MW of managed flexibility, or

• 6–10x projected annual revenues.

With a portfolio of 2.5 GW (2,500 MW), even a conservative valuation of €2M per MW puts the company at €50–100 million. Factoring in its cross-border footprint, multi-market access, and active role in system balancing, several European investors suggest Sympower’s valuation is likely in the €120–150 million range.

What makes the model especially attractive is its compounding scalability: each new MW onboarded not only generates revenue but reinforces the platform’s role as a system orchestrator — increasing its leverage, margin, and defensibility.

Why the U.S. Should Pay Attention

Despite a mature DER landscape, the U.S. still lacks coherent frameworks to:

1. Monetize behavior as a dispatchable product

Most residential and C&I assets remain passive or underutilized — with few mechanisms to turn usage patterns into tradable grid services.

2. Bridge grid-to-user coordination with real-time execution

Most current demand response offerings are either too slow, too shallow, or too fragmented to participate in fast-response balancing.

3. Deploy composable orchestration logic at system scale

While the U.S. has pockets of success, there is no cross-asset, cross-market platform capable of coordinating commercial, storage, and renewable loads under a unified framework.

This is where Sympower becomes relevant — not as a competitor, but as a reference architecture:

• For city- or utility-led demand flexibility programs;

• For regional VPP strategies driven by software rather than hardware;

• For advanced grid operators looking to license or integrate a pre-built orchestration layer.

Final Word: Flexibility Is the New Infrastructure

Sympower doesn’t own power plants. It doesn’t build transmission. But every megawatt it orchestrates helps stabilize the grid — and monetize behavior — without laying a single wire.

It’s not a tech add-on to energy. It’s a redefinition of energy as orchestrated behavior.

In that sense, Sympower isn’t just a clean energy company. It’s a company that rewrites how control, value, and coordination happen in energy systems.

And as the world moves deeper into electrification, platforms like Sympower aren’t just valuable — they’re necessary.