share this post

on this page

You have fifteen sites. Three have solar panels, two have a battery, five have had chargers added. Each site has its own installer, its own supplier and its own reporting. When someone asks which site should be next in line for investment, it takes you a week to give a properly grounded answer.

That is not down to the installations, and not down to the companies that put them in. They do exactly what was asked of them at each location. What is missing is a layer sitting above them.

TL;DR

Property owners now have decent insight per site. What they do not have is a way to control and prioritise across the portfolio.

  • Fifteen sites means the same conversation fifteen times with fifteen different parties
  • Consumption figures per site are rarely comparable, so prioritising comes down to gut feel
  • Insight tells you what happened, not what your battery or your chargers should be doing now
  • New time-dependent transmission tariffs will make the timing of consumption decisive for your network costs
  • Montea moved from six sites towards a rollout across 25 with one system rather than twenty-five separate solutions

The question is not whether you have a grip on each site. It is whether that grip can scale.

Three things that go wrong when you handle energy site by site

With one or two sites the separate approach works fine. You know the installation, you know the installer, and anything unusual stands out.

From around five sites that changes. Three things go wrong at once.

  • Your figures are not comparable. One site delivers quarter-hourly values through the grid operator, another has its own metering system with a different definition of a peak. You can put the numbers side by side, but you cannot draw a conclusion from them. Prioritising then becomes a matter of who shouts loudest.
  • Every investment starts from scratch. For each site you go through the same route: request a quote, estimate the payback period, get internal approval. What you learned at site four is never applied to site nine, because it sits in the head of a different adviser.
  • Nobody is steering. The installations are there, but each one does its own thing. The solar panels export at the very moment the battery is full. The chargers pull full power while the heat pump kicks in. That is exactly the difference between monitoring and energy management: a dashboard shows you what is happening, but it changes nothing.
EMS CO2 reductie vastgoed: distributiecentrum met zonnepanelen en batterijopslag

Generated with AI

The difference between insight and control

Most providers in the market stop at insight. Portfolio dashboards, energy labels, intensity indicators, sustainability reporting. Useful, and necessary for your obligations.

But a report does not lower a peak. It tells you in March what you got wrong in February.

Control works the other way round. The system looks ahead at price, weather and expected consumption, and adjusts the control schedule for all your assets every five minutes. Your total load stays within the limits of your connection without anyone having to intervene. Peak shaving is the best known application of that, but it is one of several.

For a portfolio, the gain is in repeatability. The same control logic runs at site one and at site twenty. An adjustment that works at one location can be applied at the next without starting over.

What that looks like on a January morning

Half past seven, occupancy is building, the heating is running flat out and there are four vans on the chargers that need to leave at eleven.

Without control those four charge simultaneously at full power, in the most expensive hour of the day. You set a peak that defines your entire month, and nobody benefits from those vans being full by nine.

With control the system works backwards from the departure time. There are three and a half hours available for a session that needs two, so charging power drops temporarily and the battery absorbs what the heating adds on top. The vans are full on time and the peak never happened. Nobody had to do anything.

Where the value sits varies by site

Two sites with comparable installations can have completely different business cases. That depends largely on the contract underneath.

  • Fixed supply contract: the value is in cost avoidance. Flattening peaks and staying within your contracted capacity, so capacity charges do not climb.
  • Dynamic contract: shifting consumption into cheaper hours comes on top of that, which requires looking ahead at price.
  • Spare battery capacity: that can also be offered on energy markets, provided you can reliably forecast how much room there is.

This is precisely why prioritising on gut feel is so difficult. The site with the most solar panels is not automatically the site with the most to gain.

Why this is becoming more pressing

There is a change coming that affects portfolios harder than individual sites.

The Dutch grid operators have submitted a proposal to regulator ACM for time-dependent transmission tariffs for large consumers on the regional networks. At present the timing of your network use makes no difference to the tariff. With time-dependent tariffs, using the network during quiet periods becomes cheaper and during busy periods more expensive. For large consumers on the national high-voltage network this has applied since 2025.

For one site that is a cost item to keep an eye on. For twenty sites it is the same question twenty times over, and you will not answer it manually. You see the same dynamic with dynamic energy tariffs across property portfolios: the more locations, the less feasible manual control becomes.

What one model actually means

One model across your portfolio comes down to three things.

  • One measurement baseline. All sites on the same definitions and the same intervals, so that a comparison actually tells you something. Only then can you determine on solid grounds which site deserves a battery first.
  • Calculating up front instead of explaining afterwards. With an energy simulation you build a digital copy of a location and run the control plan against last year’s actual data. You see what an extra battery or an expanded charging hub would deliver before you order anything. The outcome is an indication based on your own data rather than a guarantee, but it is a figure you can base an investment decision on.
  • The same control everywhere. Without each site keeping its own system and its own logic. That is also the heart of the conversation about upgrading your grid connection or managing it smartly: there is often more room within your existing connection than you think.

What this means for your installers

One control layer does not mean moving to a single installer. In a portfolio that has grown over time that is rarely realistic anyway, and it is not necessary. The companies that know your locations carry on doing what they do: installation, expansion and maintenance. What gets added is a layer that manages the assets they install as a single whole.

For installers that usually works in their favour. We run the calculation for a new battery or an expanded charging hub together with the installer who knows the location, because they know best what is physically there and what is achievable. The outcome is a properly grounded proposal to the owner rather than a quote resting on assumptions.

Are you an installer with clients running multiple sites who are hitting these questions? This is usually where the conversation starts: not with a system, but with one location you work through together.

What this looks like in practice

Montea, a developer and investor in logistics real estate in the Netherlands and Belgium, started with six locations carrying substantial PV installations and battery capacity. The EMS keeps those locations within their contracted transmission capacity, while surplus capacity is made available to trading partners. Reporting runs across all locations, with the same KPIs per site.

The point for a portfolio holder is not that it worked at six locations, but that extending towards 25 locations in the Netherlands did not become a new project. It was the same approach, on more sites.

Where to start

You do not have to tackle your entire portfolio at once. What does help is choosing the order deliberately, rather than letting whichever site happens to come up set the agenda.

A practical starting order:

  • Begin with the sites that have at least two controllable assets, for example solar plus chargers or a battery. That is where there is most room to steer.
  • Look at the locations where you are hitting the limits of your connection or where a tenant request has been blocked.
  • Work through one representative site before scaling up, so the conversation about the rest of the portfolio is about figures rather than assumptions.

From separate sites to one system

Want to know what there is to gain across your portfolio? We are happy to look at a location that is representative of the rest, run it against your own consumption data, and show what that means when you roll it out. You can read more about our approach for commercial real estate on the sector page.

Frequently asked questions

Controlling generation, storage, consumption and charging infrastructure across multiple sites from one system, rather than a separate solution per site. The difference with portfolio monitoring is that it actually adjusts rather than only measuring.

There is no hard threshold, but in practice it starts to bite at around five sites. More important than the number is whether each location has at least two controllable assets. Without something to steer there is little to optimise.

No. Existing assets are connected through common protocols. What was installed last year and what arrives next year run within the same model.

That changes who benefits, not whether it is possible. With let properties the conversation is more often about lettability, network capacity for tenant requests and the terms in the lease. Once tenants have their own connections and have to decide jointly, that is a different question from portfolio control.

follow us

Don't miss the next spark.

Subscribe and catch the latest in energy management.