Energy management (2025)

1. Interview: Will Dufton, principal at Giant Ventures

   “The energy market is extremely fragmented and complicated,” says investor Will Dufton. He nevertheless makes a brave effort to explain it.

   “The world’s vying to increase renewable energy supply on the grid but the problem is that most of these new renewables are intermittent. So energy supply is more volatile; pricing is more volatile. This is a massive problem to solve,” he says.

   “The paradox is that as the energy market becomes more sophisticated, managing flexibility becomes more difficult.”

   He talks Sifted through some of Europe’s key power management players that use price volatility to their advantage. The two big beasts are UK-based Octopus Energy and Norway’s Tibber, which provide smart appliances to help homeowners lower their energy bills and consumption. Tibber's smartphone app, for example, offers customers the cheapest available electricity per hour. It also offers a way for homes to charge their EVs when the electricity price is at its lowest.

   London-based Axle Energy, which raised £7m from VCs in 2024, connects EV chargers, heat pumps and batteries to the grid. Giant Ventures has backed Stockholm-based Flower, which helps its clients — companies that run electric car fleets, data centres and solar and battery parks among them — to feed power to the grid when demand is high. Munich-based ecoplanet — which raised a €16m Series A last month — helps companies figure out cheaper times to consume power. Paris-based Ostrum and Hamburg-based Rabot Energy (formerly Rabot Charge) have similar services.

   Homes and businesses that use their untapped energy to serve the grid are sometimes referred to as “virtual power plants” — i.e. a new network of electricity players. “And the software companies that enable these virtual plants to exist will become incredibly valuable,” Dufton explains. “In the absence of some mega-nuclear buildout in Europe, this ‘flexibility market’ is going to grow more important to regulate the grid in the future.”

   Looking down his list, he highlights Octopus and Tibber as the two that have grown the most. Expanding into other countries is no mean feat in a highly regulated industry. “The market is very regional; every country is different. Sweden has had an almost 100% uptake of smart meters; Germany has a much lower rollout rate, for example.

   “But we will see regionally-dominant players and they’ll still be great companies, even if they don’t cover the entirety of Europe,” he says. He notes that Europe installed 65.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity last year. “I don't think we’ll have a hard time underwriting a regional champion based on this figure.”

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