Energy management system software for batteries and solar

Energy management system software reads the meters, inverters and batteries on a site and sends them setpoints: when to charge, when to discharge, when to curtail production and when to trade, within the limits set by the grid, the contracts and safety. The EMS glossary entry explains the term in more detail.

We build this software for companies that run batteries and solar, or sell a platform that does. More of our energy work is on the energy software development page. Since January 2024 we have been building the EMS of the Zeronest platform. As of April 2026 it controlled more than 3,000 prosumer storage installations. The prosumer batteries under it add up to 30 MWh. The EMS we built for Skyfri went into production in June 2024 and covers 7 plants with more than 5 MWh of battery capacity and more than 4 MW of battery power. Since December 2025 we have been building an EMS for Global Green, an operator of solar and battery sites in Germany and Canada, for its 15 MWh of battery storage (BESS).

A battery energy storage system has four control layers, and the EMS is the one that decides. (For the full picture, see BESS and our article on battery energy storage systems.)

• BMS. The battery management system protects the cells: voltages, temperatures, state of charge, balancing and disconnection. It usually comes from the battery supplier.
• PCS. The power conversion system converts between AC and DC and carries out the power setpoint.
• EMS. The energy management system decides when to charge and discharge, and at what power.
• SCADA. SCADA collects data and passes commands on.

The EMS treats every limit reported by the BMS as a hard constraint.

One battery can trade, shave peaks and provide balancing services at the same time, just not with the same kilowatt-hours. A BESS energy management system, also called a battery energy management system, reserves state of charge and power for each commitment. When two commitments conflict, it applies the priority written down for that case, and it corrects for losses so the commitment is met at the grid connection point.

On European balancing markets, FCR, aFRR and mFRR require the response times and telemetry defined by the grid operator.

For Global Green we are building an orchestrator that combines setpoints from trading, aFRR and direct control, resolves conflicts and only then splits the result across batteries. By July 2026 it could compensate for losses, so the declared power reaches the connection point, and the simulator had manual battery control. The orchestrator is still being built and is not in production.

For Zeronest we also built a demand-side response (DSR) module that splits an aggregator's call across metering points. Aggregation, demand response calls and virtual power plants belong to the portfolio and market layer above the site EMS, which our page on VPP and DSR software covers.

Once a minute, the Zeronest engine decides whether each battery charges, discharges or sells energy to the grid. It bases the decision on live readings, day-ahead and intraday prices, tariffs, consumption history and the weather forecast. It works with dynamic and time-of-use tariffs and chooses how the battery cycles so that battery life is protected.

The platform supports 16 inverter brands, including Deye, GoodWe, Hoymiles and Sungrow. A storage system can be switched off, run in manual mode or run in automatic mode. Manual mode has five behaviors: charge, discharge, antireflux (no export to the grid), self-consumption and hold, set permanently or on an hourly schedule. Automatic mode has three strategies: defensive, neutral and aggressive.

In the platform's first two years, our work on Zeronest added up to about 11,220 hours.

The Skyfri EMS handles several batteries and inverters on one site. It schedules charging, discharging, peak shaving and energy trading through a trading partner. It also carries out requests from the distribution system operator (DSO) and enforces the site's maximum load and export limits. Among the starting requirements were high-load time windows from the network tariff (Hochlastzeitfenster, HLZF). The edge code is Python asyncio on Azure IoT Edge, with Azure IoT Hub in the cloud.

Work began with a Technical Feasibility Study in November 2023. We validated the EMS in Socomec's battery laboratory in Strasbourg and rolled it out in Germany and Sweden.

For Global Green the EMS runs on an industrial computer on site and sends data to the cloud. We test new logic on a device simulator in AWS, and in September 2026 a new version of the EMS went live at one of the sites.

An industrial energy management system runs a site's consumption, solar and battery within the grid connection, the network tariff and the price of energy. On commercial and industrial (C&I) sites, an EMS most often runs two jobs for the battery, and both already run in EMS software we built:

• Peak shaving: the battery discharges when the site's load would go above its limit, as in the Skyfri EMS.
• Self-consumption: the battery stores surplus solar for the site to use later instead of exporting it. In the Zeronest EMS this is a behavior of manual mode, and businesses work on the same platform as homeowners.

For companies that buy energy we also built PowerShift in 2026, a module of Enerace's procurement platform that plans when machines run based on the cost of energy and the capacity fee, a Polish charge on electricity used in peak hours.

Whichever energy management software company you pick, put four requirements in the specification:

• The control loop runs locally, on an edge device on site.
• Every setpoint is read back from the device.
• Each cycle logs its inputs, the active rule and the setpoint.
• New logic is tested on a simulator with the same interfaces as the site before it touches a production battery.

Then check what you get after delivery. Code, designs and documentation we create for a client belong to the client by default, and support runs under an SLA with named engineers on every incident.

Ask a vendor for real-time control it has built outside batteries, too. For KYOTO Group we spent three and a half years on industrial IoT and digital twin software for a molten-salt thermal energy store, ending with a SCADA-based system that monitors and controls the flow of energy in real time.

We deliver the software of a battery energy storage system: the EMS that runs on the site's device and the cloud platform around it. The batteries and inverters come from your partners or ours.

The Zeronest EMS went into production in June 2024, five months after work began in January 2024. The Skyfri EMS reached production the same month, seven months after a feasibility study in November 2023. Requirements such as mixed battery brands, offline operation, trading or grid operator commands add scope to that schedule.