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Twenty businesses on a business park, a shared grid connection under a group transport agreement, solar panels on every roof and a communal battery next to the transformer. On paper, an energy hub. In practice, the park manager rings three participants every morning to ask if they can switch on their chargers an hour later.
With three participants that still works. With ten it becomes a full-time job without a dashboard.
Most energy hubs start with enthusiasm but stall the moment the number of participants or assets grows. The reason is nearly always the same: there is no central energy management system (CEMS) coordinating capacity across the hub. Without that coordination layer, an energy hub is a collection of separate connections sharing a contract. Only when software takes over the allocation does a hub become genuinely smart.
Manual control of an energy hub breaks down as complexity grows. Capacity goes unused, participants lose trust and the hub stops scaling.
- A group of 20 businesses typically sits at roughly 150% of the shared connection capacity, on the assumption that they never all peak at once. Without a central system, that assumption is a gamble.
- The optimal control schedule changes every five minutes. No spreadsheet or phone call keeps up.
- Participants who consistently give up capacity without seeing what it yields will disengage.
- Without dynamic allocation, surplus solar generation goes unused while the neighbour buys expensive power from the grid.
- The cooperative managing the group connection has no data to bill fairly.
An energy hub without an EMS is a shared connection with shared problems. With an EMS, that same connection becomes a shared advantage.
What makes an energy hub “smart”?
The difference between a smart grid, microgrid and energy hub comes down to stakeholders. An energy hub has multiple independent businesses, each with their own interests, contracts and often their own energy supplier. Those businesses jointly move from individual connection agreements to a group transport agreement (known in the Netherlands as a GTO). That covers the legal basis.
The “smart” in smart energy hub refers to the software running on top of that structure. In practice, two layers are needed:
These two layers work together in a bottom-up model. Intelligence starts locally and builds up to group level. The CEMS does not need to calculate everything itself. It raises or lowers the capacity boundary per participant, and the local EMS responds within seconds.
Without those layers, allocation is static. Each business gets a fixed block of capacity and sits on it, whether it uses 10% or 100%.
Why manual control does not scale
The checkout analogy helps here. Two checkouts in a supermarket, each with its own queue: you always pick the wrong one. One queue feeding two checkouts: you reach the till at the right moment. Total capacity stays the same, but the allocation becomes more efficient.
In an energy hub without an EMS, that is twenty checkouts with twenty queues. The park manager tries to redirect people from one queue to another, based on whoever he last spoke to.
Three concrete situations where that breaks down:
The minimum technical threshold
A smart energy hub does not need full automation from day one. The minimum requirement per participant is a main meter reading. Without that measurement, the CEMS cannot determine how much capacity is available.
Participants who already have controllable assets (battery, chargers, flexible production processes) get immediate additional value: the local EMS can optimise those assets and make flexibility available to the hub. Participants without controllable assets remain on their nominal capacity and passively make unused capacity available. That still delivers value to the group.
The technical limit of a connection is absolute. A CEMS can allocate capacity more intelligently, but it cannot conjure up more. What it can do: deploy existing capacity in a way that means the group does not need a grid upgrade to keep growing.
At Enexis Best, that approach delivered 45% lower energy costs and 50% CO₂ reduction, without requesting additional grid capacity. At Montea, the system scaled from six to 25 sites on the same underlying architecture.
From static hub to growing system
Setting up an energy hub on a business park typically starts with a front-runner group of three to five businesses. That is enough to initiate the group connection application and establish the cooperative. The challenge sits in the next step: from five to twenty participants, from solar panels only to batteries, chargers and heat pumps as well.
That scalability only works if the coordination layer is in place from the start. Connecting a new business should mean: install a gateway, couple the main meter, assign nominal capacity in the CEMS. No redesign of the entire hub.
Tibo EMS is built on that principle. The local EMS per participant optimises behind the meter. The CEMS allocates capacity across the hub. Those layers work independently of asset brand or type, because control runs through standard protocols (Modbus, OCPP). New participants onboard without disrupting the existing configuration.
Curious what building blocks are needed? Read our overview of the building blocks of a successful energy hub.
Frequently asked questions
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