For more SAP util­i­ties insights, sign up to receive ASUG’s free The Top­ic: Util­i­ties newslet­ter, and to get involved and keep up with the lat­est, join ASUG’s Util­i­ties Com­mu­ni­ty. Con­nect with SAP teams across the util­i­ties com­mu­ni­ty as they explore AI adop­tion, clean core, data strat­e­gy, and more at SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG in San Anto­nio, Octo­ber 6 – 9, 2026.

Dis­trib­uted ener­gy resources — the rooftop solar, home bat­ter­ies, EV charg­ers, and heat pumps installed close to where ener­gy is used — are mul­ti­ply­ing at the grid’s edge, and SAP expects them to grow rough­ly ten­fold by 2030. For util­i­ties, that is a major oppor­tu­ni­ty and a test. 

The assets throw off enor­mous vol­umes of data and open a flex­i­bil­i­ty mar­ket SAP val­ues at more than €50 bil­lion by 2030, but cap­tur­ing that val­ue means mas­ter­ing the com­plex­i­ty, and the com­pa­nies that are slow to adapt risk being dis­placed by com­peti­tors bet­ter built for it. 

A recent SAP webi­nar, ​“Unlock­ing Ener­gy Flex­i­bil­i­ty with SAP Dis­trib­uted Ener­gy Resources,” focused on that chal­lenge and how SAP is respond­ing to it. Mateu Munar, Senior Direc­tor in SAP’s Indus­try Busi­ness Unit for Util­i­ties, and Stephane Dot­to, SAP’s Lead for Dis­trib­uted Ener­gy Resources & E‑Mobility, laid out SAP Dis­trib­uted Ener­gy Resources (DER), ran a live demo, and shared a roadmap for where it goes next. 

Why the Dis­trib­uted Ener­gy Boom Is Real­ly a Data Problem 

To bring home the issue, in a quite lit­er­al sense, Dot­to start­ed with his own house. When Dot­to set out to build a new home in Bel­gium, he expect­ed that the all-elec­tric, solar-equipped design now required of new con­struc­tion there would low­er his ener­gy costs. His pro­jec­tions showed the oppo­site, and he walked through the expe­ri­ence as a cau­tion­ary case study. 

He want­ed to hold his ener­gy costs down on a house pro­ject­ed to use 18,000 kWh a year, fit­ted with 16 kWp of rooftop solar, a 27 kWh bat­tery, and an elec­tric car that would add anoth­er 6,000 kWh. Pulling it togeth­er meant deal­ing with agen­cies that don’t talk to each oth­er. He had to ask his dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem oper­a­tor what invert­er capac­i­ty he was per­mit­ted, then approach a sep­a­rate gov­ern­ment body to learn which tax­es that capac­i­ty would trig­ger, with no link between the two. 

He bench­marked equip­ment, com­pared more than 60 ser­vice providers, and weighed 13 sup­pli­ers whose offers ran from €4,213 to €4,905. He plans to sign a dynam­ic-pric­ing con­tract but expects lit­tle reward for the capac­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty he will feed back to the grid, since the B2C aggre­ga­tors and ener­gy com­mu­ni­ties that would pay for it do not yet exist where he lives. 

Munar scaled the same prob­lem sec­tor-wide, where the same frag­men­ta­tion com­pounds across mil­lions of assets. Util­i­ties that fail to adapt, said Munar, ​“risk being reduced to com­mod­i­ty providers while plat­form com­peti­tors cap­ture the val­ue of the ener­gy transition.” 

He argued that the high­er-val­ue process­es only work when the data beneath them is sound. Con­ges­tion man­age­ment, vir­tu­al pow­er plants, ener­gy com­mu­ni­ties, demand response, and new pro­sumer prod­ucts all run on large vol­umes of ener­gy data, and at most util­i­ties, that data is too frag­ment­ed to rely on. Clean it up first, argued Munar, and the rest becomes possible. 

SAP sup­plies that foun­da­tion, han­dling ener­gy and asset reg­is­tra­tion, and leaves the use cas­es on top to part­ners. Those part­ners inte­grate native­ly with the plat­form. ​“This is not a sin­gle-ven­dor game,” said Munar. 

The Plat­form and the Part­ners Around It 

SAP DER is built on two pil­lars. One man­ages instal­la­tions of any com­plex­i­ty along with the pro­sumer data around them: asset reg­is­tra­tion, mas­ter data, meter­ing and com­mer­cial struc­tures, tar­iffs, and pric­ing all live here. The oth­er is an ener­gy-data engine that ingests read­ings and val­i­dates, esti­mates, and edits them, detects anom­alies, and han­dles aggre­ga­tion, fore­cast­ing, shar­ing, and set­tle­ment at high resolution. 

The plat­form sits on SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form and inte­grates native­ly with SAP S/4HANA Util­i­ties, embed­ded in a stack SAP frames as end-to-end across cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, asset man­age­ment, meter-to-cash, and ana­lyt­ics. SAP mapped its require­ments sep­a­rate­ly for dis­tri­b­u­tion oper­a­tors, trans­mis­sion oper­a­tors, and sup­pli­ers, since each plays a dif­fer­ent role in the flex­i­bil­i­ty market. 

For the use cas­es that sit on top, SAP named strate­gic part­ners that plug into the plat­form, among them Exna­ton for ener­gy com­mu­ni­ties, Volue for grid con­ges­tion man­age­ment and load shap­ing, Evo­lu­tion Energie for port­fo­lio man­age­ment and trad­ing, SEW for pro­sumer insights and demand-side man­age­ment, Net2Grid for behind-the-meter dis­ag­gre­ga­tion, and Enode for con­nec­tiv­i­ty, flex­i­bil­i­ty man­age­ment, and vir­tu­al pow­er plants. 

A Live Demo 

Dot­to returned for a two-part demon­stra­tion. The first cen­tered on SAP’s own exper­i­men­tal cam­pus in Mou­g­ins, France, a site enrolled in the EU-fund­ed Be Flex­i­ble project, with 44 EV charg­ing points, 96 kWp of solar, and a 150 kWh bat­tery across the grounds. 

Using the Mea­sure­ment Con­cept Man­age­ment appli­ca­tion, he showed how the plat­form mod­els the site’s full topol­o­gy, map­ping the grid con­nec­tion down through its pro­duc­ers, con­sumers, and stor­age, with each node car­ry­ing its meter­ing loca­tion and ener­gy read­ings. The detail mat­ters, explained Dot­to, because a DSO can­not plan grid rein­force­ment and a sup­pli­er can­not steer equip­ment if nei­ther knows the type, brand, or ser­i­al num­ber of the assets behind the meter. 

He point­ed to the application’s reusable mod­el­ing — one mod­el scal­ing from a home with a sin­gle charge point and one solar array to a site with 10 charg­ers and five arrays — and not­ed that dis­tri­b­u­tion oper­a­tors and ener­gy sup­pli­ers are already using it. Dot­to pre­sent­ed the topol­o­gy work as the foun­da­tion that any flex­i­bil­i­ty use case depends on. 

The sec­ond demon­stra­tion ran an ener­gy-shar­ing com­mu­ni­ty from end to end, com­bin­ing the platform’s mod­el­ing and ener­gy-data com­po­nents with part­ner Exna­ton and SAP’s util­i­ties core for billing. Mea­sure­ment Con­cept Man­age­ment onboard­ed the cus­tomer and mod­eled the pro­duc­ing and con­sum­ing assets. The util­i­ties core held the mas­ter data, down to device ser­i­al num­bers and reg­is­ters. The ener­gy-data lay­er pulled in the time-series read­ings the DSO report­ed, and stored Exnaton’s per-mem­ber set­tle­ment fig­ures along­side them. Exna­ton han­dled the com­mu­ni­ty side. 

The demo cre­at­ed a com­mu­ni­ty and enrolled its mem­bers, then turned to pric­ing. A com­mu­ni­ty can set sep­a­rate rates for what mem­bers pro­duce and con­sume, plus rates for the resid­ual amounts on each side, and it can split the shared val­ue either pro­por­tion­al­ly or dynam­i­cal­ly. Each mem­ber can see their own pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion, along with their total cost. Exna­ton set­tled the shared ener­gy, and the util­i­ties core pro­duced the mem­ber invoices. 

On the Hori­zon: AI and Deep­er Integration 

The solu­tion is avail­able in the pub­lic cloud and acces­si­ble to any cus­tomer, said Munar, and it began in the Ger­man mar­ket with a lead cus­tomer there before being inter­na­tion­al­ized to pick up cus­tomers else­where. SAP laid out a roadmap across three hori­zons — sub­ject to change. 

Its H1 2026 ​“Foun­da­tion” phase brought the new mod­el­ing inter­face, ener­gy-com­mu­ni­ty def­i­n­i­tion, anom­aly detec­tion, and the inter­na­tion­al­ized data mod­el, along with first pro­sumer-fac­ing capa­bil­i­ties span­ning com­mer­cial agree­ments and dynam­ic pric­ing. The ​“Growth” phase in H2 adds mod­el­ing of con­trol­lable assets such as invert­ers and home ener­gy man­age­ment sys­tems, syn­thet­ic load pro­fil­ing, deep­er S/4HANA inte­gra­tion, an exten­sion to water cus­tomers, and the first AI cases. 

Beyond 2026, a ​“Future” hori­zon sketch­es ener­gy set­tle­ment, an exten­sion to gas cus­tomers, embed­ded IoT inte­gra­tion, and more advanced AI cas­es and agents. The plat­form, said Munar, is a nat­ur­al base for build­ing those AI cas­es on top. 

For more SAP util­i­ties insights, sign up to receive ASUG’s free The Top­ic: Util­i­ties newslet­ter, and to get involved and keep up with the lat­est, join ASUG’s Util­i­ties Com­mu­ni­ty. Con­nect with SAP teams across the util­i­ties com­mu­ni­ty as they explore AI adop­tion, clean core, data strat­e­gy, and more at SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG in San Anto­nio, Octo­ber 6 – 9, 2026.