When a German grid gets congested, its operator switches off wind turbines and solar parks, even when the wind blows and the sun shines. Energy & Meteo Systems, an Oldenburg company that made its name forecasting wind power, pitched the European Innovation Council a way to see that congestion coming. FuturePowerFlow combines weather forecasts, the location and status of renewable plants, grid data and historic demand to predict power flows in a grid for the next 48 hours, according to CORDIS. The company was selected in the EIC Accelerator pilot cut-off of 9 October 2019 with a grant only award, and appears under its own name on the European Commission's list of selected companies, the only row for the project.
Seven years on, the software exists, has paying grid operators and has moved into its own company. What it became is narrower than the pitch: a German compliance and congestion platform for Redispatch 2.0, the rules that since October 2021 make grid operators include renewable plants from 100 kW in congestion management.
Company file
- Legal entity
- Energy & Meteo Systems GmbH, Amtsgericht Oldenburg HRB 5596
- Founded
- 2004 per the company; registered 16 August 2005
- Headquarters
- Oskar-Homt-Str. 1, Oldenburg, Germany
- Leadership
- Ulrich Focken and Matthias Lange (founders, managing directors); Jan Rosenkranz (managing director, emsys grid services)
- Group
- Energy & Meteo Systems GmbH, emsys grid services GmbH, emsys VPP GmbH, trading as emsys
- Investors
- None found; not in the EIC Fund portfolio
- EIC project
- FuturePowerFlow, March 2020 to February 2022, grant only
- Staff (2024)
- 80 at the parent and 46 at emsys grid services, per Implisense
What the Company Does Now
The company is active. The Oldenburg register shows Energy & Meteo Systems GmbH with Focken and Lange as managing directors and its accounts for the year to 31 May 2025 published on 29 July 2026, according to North Data. Its two subsidiaries, emsys grid services GmbH and emsys VPP GmbH, filed theirs the same day. The group now presents itself as emsys and runs three lines: wind and solar power forecasts, virtual power plant software for energy traders, and the grid platform that grew out of FuturePowerFlow.
Its 2026 news is mostly about the trading side, such as integrating Statkraft's 300 MW Thurrock battery into emsys VPP's virtual power plant, according to the company's newsroom. The grid unit still holds an annual customer event; at the 2025 edition, MITNETZ Strom and SWO Netz presented and the company showed a new check of plant controllability under the German Energy Industry Act, according to emsys. In October 2025 founders Ulrich Focken and Matthias Lange received the Oldenburg Business Award for the company's forecasting models, reported by pv magazine and the company.
The Technology: Forecasting the Grid, Not Just the Weather
Grid control rooms were built to react: when a line overloads, the operator curtails generation. The project's argument, set out on CORDIS, was that existing control systems are "not made for a proactive and exact management and control of single assets". FuturePowerFlow links the company's own renewable power forecasts with load forecasts, grid topology and the operating status of plants, iced or under maintenance, and runs power flow calculations on the result, so an operator can see where congestion will occur over the next two days and plan curtailment, switching or redispatch in advance.
The CORDIS results article describes a modular platform with grid analysis, accounting of lost energy and communication with plant operators, installed in a grid operator's own data centre or run from the company's data centres as a cloud service. The company's product page adds scheduling, billing and standardised market communication, and says an optimiser computes congestion solutions "within a few seconds". That speed claim has not been independently tested in any published source.
The difference from incumbents is less the physics than the starting point. Power flow calculation is standard control room software; Energy & Meteo Systems came to it from the weather side, as a forecaster that already sold wind and solar predictions to grid operators. In Germany it competes with control room suppliers such as PSI, which sells its own modular redispatch software to grid operators like MVV Netze.
"Instead of just reacting to demand, FuturePowerFlow enables grid operators, for the first time ever, to proactively plan and manage the integration of decentralised renewable assets into their grid."
Yannick Zytur, FuturePowerFlow project coordinator, to CORDIS, 2022What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows
FuturePowerFlow was signed on 25 February 2020 and ran from 1 March 2020 to 28 February 2022 under the Horizon 2020 SME instrument topic, with a total cost of €2,403,750 and an EU contribution of €1,682,625, according to CORDIS. The fact sheet splits the grant: Energy & Meteo Systems received a net €549,062.50, and emsys grid services GmbH, listed as a linked third party, €1,133,562.50. The EC list names only the parent company. The company announced the award in December 2019 and said it would run "several pilot projects" with European grid operators over two years, reported by Solarserver.
The final periodic report is short. It says the prototype was finished with insights from pilot users, the company was "up-scaled regarding the new business field", and market entry succeeded "by selling the product to first non-pilot users". It names no customers and gives no figures. The public record fills some of that gap.
- Finished 48-hour power flow systemDeliveredPrototype finalised and sold, per the CORDIS report; product marketed since by emsys grid services.
- Pilots with grid operatorsDeliveredPilot users acquired, per CORDIS; the pilots themselves are not named.
- Paying grid operator customersDeliveredNine E.ON grid operators (September 2020) and N-ERGIE Netz (January 2021), confirmed by trade press.
- Expansion to other European countriesNot deliveredNot delivered: no grid customer outside Germany announced; the goal was stated again in 2022.
Three of four goals were met, and the fourth, expansion beyond Germany, was not. The project closed on its scheduled end date and its last CORDIS update came in November 2022. Whether the full grant was paid out is not public.
What It Has Achieved Since the Award
The customers came from regulation. Germany's grid acceleration law (NABEG 2.0) brought every plant from 100 kW into congestion management from 1 October 2021, nearly 100,000 plants according to the Bundesnetzagentur. Every distribution grid operator needed software for it. In September 2020, six months into the EIC project, nine distribution grid operators of the E.ON group chose FuturePowerFlow for Redispatch 2.0, with a separate system for each, according to the company. In January 2021 Nuremberg's N-ERGIE Netz bought the platform as a hosted service; its managing director Gerald Höfer said it had "consciously chose Software-as-a-Service", reported by ZfK and the company.
On 1 June 2021 the company moved FuturePowerFlow into emsys grid services GmbH and its virtual power plant business into emsys VPP GmbH, keeping forecasting and consulting in the parent, reported by Solarserver and ZfK; the register entries of the split are dated 30 June 2021 on North Data. The grid subsidiary itself had been registered on 26 May 2020, and Jan Rosenkranz became a managing director in November 2023, according to North Data and the company's management page.
How many grid operators use the platform today is not published. The product page speaks of "numerous grid operators" without names or a count, and the company's recent news mostly speaks of its "grid platform" rather than of FuturePowerFlow.
The Money
The group raised no outside equity that could be found, and it is not on the EIC Fund's list of about 315 invested companies, checked across all 16 pages of the official portfolio; the award was grant only. The founders still run the parent. Revenue and profit are behind North Data's paywall. Implisense, which reads the filed accounts, gives balance sheet totals for 2024 of €5,925,288 for Energy & Meteo Systems GmbH, €4,383,470 for emsys grid services and €4,393,169 for emsys VPP.
Staff figures disagree
Implisense lists 80 employees at the parent and 46 at each subsidiary for 2024, which would make 172. An undated Wirtschaftsforum interview gives 120 staff, and a KI-Syndikat profile reviewed in June 2026 says over 200. The identical figure for both subsidiaries makes the Implisense split uncertain; the filed headcounts could not be checked directly.
The EIC grant was one of many public research grants. North Data lists German federal funding for projects such as enera (€2,076,847 from 2017), WindRamp, SnowFogS and PV-Fokus, and CORDIS shows a second Horizon 2020 project, Smart4RES, a forecasting research consortium from November 2019 to April 2023 in which the company received €408,125. The grid subsidiary has its own German grants, three in 2022 totalling €1,941,844, including digiTechNetz on low-voltage grid operation, according to North Data.
Why Europe Should Care
Curtailment is the expensive side of renewable growth, and the European Commission's Grid Action Plan of 28 November 2023 said networks will have to accommodate a "more digitalised, decentralised and flexible system", that 40% of distribution grids are more than 40 years old and that €584 billion of investment is necessary by 2030, according to the Commission's announcement. Software that lets operators use existing lines more fully is the cheapest part of that agenda. A European supplier with its own weather and forecasting base also keeps grid control data in European hands.
What the project pitched
A first-of-its-kind system for transmission and distribution operators, aimed at a "EUR 2.6bn energy market", with pilots across Europe and expansion into other European countries.
What the record shows
A working platform sold to German distribution grid operators to meet Redispatch 2.0, now run by its own subsidiary. No customer outside Germany and no user count have been published.
The Verdict
Partly delivered: one country
FuturePowerFlow did what an EIC grant is meant to do: a product left the project with paying customers and a company built around it. The timing helped. German law forced every grid operator to buy redispatch software in 2021, and the grant paid for development while E.ON's operators were signing. The European expansion it promised was not delivered: seven years after selection, no grid customer outside Germany has been announced, and the evidence shows a German tool for German rules.
Energy & Meteo Systems has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.
Sources
- CORDIS, FuturePowerFlow fact sheet and periodic report
- CORDIS, Predicting fluctuations in renewable energy generation, 2022
- CORDIS, Smart4RES fact sheet
- European Commission, EIC Accelerator selected companies, 9 October 2019 cut-off
- EIC Fund, invested companies
- North Data, Energy & Meteo Systems GmbH, emsys grid services GmbH and emsys VPP GmbH
- Implisense, Energy & Meteo Systems GmbH, emsys grid services and emsys VPP
- Solarserver, EIC award, 13 December 2019
- emsys, E.ON relies on platform solution, 17 September 2020
- ZfK, N-ERGIE Netz chooses software as a service, January 2021 and emsys announcement
- Solarserver, spin-off, 17 June 2021 and ZfK, 18 June 2021
- Bundesnetzagentur, Redispatch information rules, 23 March 2021
- emsys, FuturePowerFlow product page and management page
- emsys, egs Grid Operator Days 2025 and 2026 newsroom
- pv magazine, Oldenburg Business Award 2025 and emsys announcement
- Wirtschaftsforum, interview with Matthias Lange (undated) and KI-Syndikat profile
- PSI, MVV Netze redispatch software
- European Commission, EU Action Plan for Grids and announcement, 28 November 2023
