We turn factory heat into a virtual power plant
Germany now pays for flexible demand, and factories hold more of it than anyone else. Every steam grid can breathe a little, every furnace can wait a little. Nobody sells it: control rooms hold setpoints, and nobody plans against tomorrow’s prices.
Gridamo plans each site’s boilers against the day-ahead price and the grid’s peak charge, inside the band the plant sets. Then it pools the sites into one block for energy, reserve, and capacity markets.
Same 20 MW boiler, same 2025 prices: the obvious rule, boiler on whenever power is cheaper, loses €1.11 million a year because it breaks the site’s annual peak. Gridamo’s plan makes €0.27 million. At October 2026 fuel prices it makes €1.71 million, because power beats gas in 4,628 hours of the year instead of 1,383.
The obvious rule breaks the peak. The plan never does.
- Power cheaper than gas
- Site load without the boiler
- Electric boiler under the plan
- Load under the simple rule
- Annual peak without the boiler
Sample site with a 20 MW electric boiler, 12 to 18 May 2025. Day-ahead prices DE-LU from SMARD.de. Synthetic site with assumed gas, CO2, and grid prices. October 2026 fuel prices: gas 85 €/MWh and CO2 85 €/t on 2025 power prices. Yellow marks simulated values.
Tomorrow’s plan, on prices published this afternoon
Every process has a band. We sell it.
A control room holds a setpoint. The process never needed one that tight. Boiler makers already let the pressure swing about 10 % around the setpoint, and at Currenta’s Chempark the delivery terms put the 6 bar steam anywhere between 5.0 and 6.5 bar and 150 to 200 °C. Inside that band the water and steam in the grid store heat. The boilers can run ahead of demand or behind it for minutes, and the plant never notices.
That band is money twice. Hour by hour, the plan picks the cheaper fuel and fills the band when power is cheap. Second by second, the pool sells the same swing as reserve: an electrode boiler moves 7 MW a minute, and in a 2021 study of a chemical site the band alone carried up to 10 MW of reserve. On the sample site a 1 bar band stores 1.5 MWh, lets the pool switch the boiler on at up to 6 MW for a quarter hour, and earns about €85,000 a year at 30,000 €/MW.
Steam is where we start, not where it ends. An aluminium smelter already runs 25 % above or below its load for up to 48 hours. A cement mill parks four hours of grinding in its silo. Our prototype does it with an air conditioner: the room has a comfort band, and the controller buys the cheap hours.
Boiler band from Bosch Industrial, Dampfkesselplanung. Chempark bands from Currenta’s Technische Anschluss- und Lieferbedingungen, July 2024. Study from Energies 14 (2021) 1533, a dynamic simulation of the steam supply of a chemical site. Ramp rate from InfraLeuna, 35 MW electrode boiler, 26 August 2026. Smelter from TRIMET’s virtual battery, 2019. Cement from Agora Energiewende, load management in southern Germany, May 2014. Storage per bar and reserve price are assumptions, marked yellow.
One site is a saving. Ten sites are a power plant.
The site plan pays from day one and needs no market access. The pool is where the margin lives: prequalification with the grid operator done once, a desk that bids around the clock, and other sites that cover an outage. We start with a few chemical parks in one grid control zone, first through a licensed partner. On 1 December 2027 Germany holds its first capacity auction open to pooled loads of 1 MW and more. We intend to be in it.
Capacity market: Strom-Versorgungssicherheits- und Kapazitätengesetz of 21 July 2026, first bidding date 1 December 2027 for the delivery year 2031. Reserve markets: prequalification terms of the German transmission operators, version of 7 October 2026.
Run it on your own site
Change the boiler, the prices, the grid charges, and the band, or upload a year of your own load data. Everything runs in your browser and your file never leaves your computer. If you run a steam grid and want the plan for your site, send us a year of load data and we run the check with you.
Open the quick checkBuilt by someone who has sold software to 20 plants
Tim Eschert built the European business of Fero Labs, a machine-learning company for process plants, from the first customer: Founding Partner Europe from 2017, Managing Director EMEA from 2022, pilots at more than 20 industrial companies. He is an engineer (RWTH Aachen, Columbia), and he wrote the quick check and the prototype himself.
Düsseldorf, Germany
tim@gridamo.com
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