Virtual power plant software for aggregators and energy cooperatives

Demand response software takes an aggregator's call, splits it across metering points, tells participants and settles the hour against a baseline. We have been building the demand-side response (DSR) module of the Zeronest platform since May 2025, and on March 23, 2026 it handled a real call in production.

A DSR operator sees all installations, a DSR client only its own, and a consultant role acts on behalf of either. The module groups metering points into aggregation units and stores unavailability notices for each point and unit. Since 2026 each point gets its own declared power with a buffer above the ordered value, so a 5 MW call can require 5.25 MW from clients; the API rejects a call whose total does not match the limit and the buffer, and splits power into whole kW. A call lasts at most an hour, starts on the full hour and falls between 7:00 and 22:00.

The baseline is corrected by the average difference between consumption and the profile in the third, fourth and fifth hour before the call, capped between -20% and +20%, and the factor also covers the following hours of the call. After an outage the platform restores missing meter data, including gaps longer than 10 days. Participants get an SMS and an e-mail with a confirmation link, and ten minutes after a call is created the operator gets a list of SMS messages that did not go out. The report for a call hour is ready a quarter of an hour after it ends; its limit is the sum of the points' limits, and a client sharing a call sees only the combined power of its own points.

Energy cooperative software calculates, hour by hour, what each member and the cooperative as a whole owe and are owed. We built the energy cooperative module for Zeronest in 2026. It settles the group and each metering point and splits the energy of every hour into three streams: used by members on site, put into the deposit (unused energy carried over to later months) and exchanged with the grid. Settlements are available through an API and recalculated every 5 minutes between the 23rd and 58th minute of the hour, with a check of who was a member in that hour. In July 2026 the operator got control over many installations at once, and in September 2026 a new deposit settlement mode.

Polish law sets the rules: up to 10 MW of capacity, at least 70% of the cooperative's own needs covered, energy fed into the grid set against energy taken at a 1:0.6 ratio on hourly data, and a deposit valid for up to 12 months. From October 19, 2026 the hourly data comes from CSIRE, Poland's central energy market information system.

A battery on a balancing market has to deliver declared power within the market's activation time and stay within the limits set by the DSO. PSE, the Polish transmission system operator, gives full activation times of 30 seconds for FCR, 5 minutes for aFRR, 12.5 minutes for mFRR and 30 minutes for RR.

Since December 2025 we have been building an EMS for Global Green, an operator of solar and battery storage sites in Germany and Canada, covering 15 MWh of storage. It runs on an industrial computer on site and sends data to the cloud. Its orchestrator combines setpoints from trading, aFRR and direct control, resolves conflicts and only then splits the result across batteries; we closed its initial implementation on June 29, 2026, and the MVP is in progress. In July 2026 we added loss compensation, which raises discharge power and lowers charge power by a configured percentage so the commitment is met at the grid connection point, within the battery's operating range and with every clipped value logged. The same month brought three controllers for DSO commands: a battery limit, a direct battery command and an export limit, with the DSO modelled in a simulator. In September 2026 a new version of the EMS went onto the controller at one site.

As of October 2026, migration of the existing aFRR pipeline to the new platform is in testing, and the controller that combines trading and aFRR on one battery has a finished design and is being implemented. The EMS we built for Skyfri does peak shaving and limits export at the DSO's request; by October 2024, DSO-requested export limiting, zero-export algorithms and a maximum load limiter had been tested on site together with the DSO.