We built an
operating system for energy.
Solar parks. Battery storage. EV chargers. Heat pumps. Diesel gensets. Across the Netherlands, energy is no longer something you simply measure — it's something you run, by the second. The Elteq EMS platform turns a field of mismatched hardware into one intelligent, controllable, grid-aware system. Here's how it works, and why it matters.
The grid is full.
The Dutch power grid has run out of room. Connection queues stretch for years; grid congestion — netcongestie — is now a line item in every energy business case. The fix everyone is reaching for is the same: batteries. To shave the peaks, to store cheap power, to trade the swings, to keep an industrial connection inside its contracted limit.
But a battery is dumb metal until something tells it when to charge, when to hold, and when to push back into the grid. That something is the hard part — the brain that has to be right every quarter-hour, talk to whatever hardware the installer happened to bolt in, and never, ever do something unsafe with a megawatt. That brain is what we built.
One platform, every vendor.
SMA, Huawei, Sungrow, Janitza, BYD, Tesla — every manufacturer speaks its own dialect of Modbus, XML and CSV. Most monitoring tools pick one and lock you in. We don't.
Speak everything
Vendor data lands in a single universal format, normalised to real engineering units at the moment of ingest. Add a new brand of inverter and the dashboards just work — no rebuild, no migration, no per-device special-casing.
Built to scale
Telemetry streams into a column-oriented time-series store, one database per site, scaling out cluster by cluster. Years of 15-minute — even 10-minute — history compress to a few hundred megabytes and stay instantly queryable.
Not just a dashboard. A controller.
Most "energy platforms" stop at pretty graphs. Ours doesn't. At the edge of every managed site sits ELTEQ-OS — a hardened industrial controller, built on a Compulab IMX8 DIN-rail computer, that doesn't just report on the battery, the inverters and the meter. It runs them.
It receives the plan from the cloud, executes setpoints locally in real time, and keeps the site optimal even when the internet drops. Wired Ethernet with automatic SIM failover. Encrypted, pull-only, friendly to any customer firewall. From a fresh box to a fully managed controller in a single self-extracting install — and from that moment, the site is part of the fleet: monitored, optimised, and steerable from anywhere.
Programs decide. The platform can always stop.
Controlling megawatts safely is a design problem, not a feature. Our entire control system rests on four principles — and the last one is the one that lets us sleep at night.
Programs decide
A dedicated control program — zero-on-grid, peak-shaving, price-following — owns the strategy and is the only thing allowed to move a setpoint. Strategy lives in one place, isolated from everything else on the box.
Drivers translate
A universal driver layer turns "deliver 250 kW" into the exact register dance each specific battery needs. New hardware means a new driver — never a new strategy, and never a rewrite of the brain.
The platform selects
The cloud chooses which program runs and tunes its parameters — but pushes plans, not twitchy per-second commands. So when the connection drops, the site holds its last good plan and keeps running. Fail-operational, not fail-dark.
The platform can always stop
One master gate, enforced on the controller itself, can force every asset to a safe state in seconds. It's the one command that never needs a second opinion — and it works even when the program above it is wedged.
Layered on top: per-command authorisation, two-factor confirmation for dangerous changes, and an on-device safety envelope. Control you can trust with real hardware — because the safe direction is the one that never asks permission.
Trading energy by the quarter-hour.
Every day the European power exchange publishes tomorrow's electricity price in 15-minute blocks. The platform pulls that curve automatically and turns it into action: charge when power is cheap or negative, discharge into the evening peak, and never breach the grid-connection limit the site pays dearly to exceed.
Solar production forecasts — from national meteorological data and 1AITE's own irradiance service — feed the same plan, so a battery doesn't waste a charge it could have taken from the sun an hour later. Peak-shaving, EPEX-arbitrage, self-consumption, frequency response. The result isn't a report about what you could have saved. It's a battery that already did.
This isn't a pitch deck. It's running.
Every installation comes online the same way: we observe first, prove the data is right, and only then take control.
Industrial battery park
Three half-megawatt batteries and a precision power-quality meter, shaving an industrial medium-voltage connection — observed and managed live from the platform.
Battery + diesel backup
A 500 kW battery paired with a diesel genset behind a public venue, with full EN 50160 power-quality compliance monitored and certified automatically, week after week.
Solar fleets
Inverter fleets streaming production history, backfilled and analysed down to string level where the inverter platform exposes it — anomalies, performance ratio, and weather-corrected yield, all in one view.
A platform, not a feature.
Behind the control core is a full operations suite — because running energy assets is more than reading a meter.
Power-quality compliance
EN 50160 assessment from precision meters, with branded weekly reports generated and delivered automatically.
Asset lifecycle
Every inverter, battery and meter tracked from install to warranty expiry, with alerts before the cover runs out.
Maintenance & parts
Recurring service schedules, spare-parts inventory and a per-site operational logbook — the whole O&M record in one place.
Safety inspections
NEN 3140 and equivalent inspection records with certificate-expiry tracking and fleet-wide alerting.
Alarms that mean it
Telemetry-driven alarms — from cell over-temperature to "connection lost to site-controller" — surfaced on a live map and a customer support desk.
Open by design
A documented B2B REST API, white-label theming so partners run it under their own brand, and five languages out of the box.
Secure to the edge
Per-device identity with hardware binding, on-demand encrypted VPN to the box, and signed updates for code that lives on someone else's network.
Audited end to end
Every sensitive action — every setpoint, every override, every login — recorded immutably. You can always answer "who, what, when".
One brain, two worlds
The same engineering powers Het Brein for homes — solar, heat pump, battery and charger steered on the live EPEX tariff, day and night.
Energy that manages itself —
safely, profitably, on your terms.
1AITE built it end to end: the edge controller, the ingestion pipeline, the time-series core, the trading logic, the safety architecture, and the operations suite around it. If you own energy assets and you're tired of just watching them, let's talk.