Built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), SAP Distributed Energy Resources (SAP DER) can provide a trusted data backbone that helps unify technical assets with commercial agreements, transforming millions of prosumer devices into coordinated services.
From energy sharing and dynamic pricing to cloud-native and interoperable flexibility markets, the solution can connect meters, markets, and customers to enable business models such as energy communities, virtual power plants, and demand response. Combined with a curated ecosystem of specialist technology partners, SAP empowers utilities to own their energy transition.
The energy transition runs on data, but data is getting harder to manage
The energy transition is reshaping the power landscape. Utilities are evolving from centralized generation toward systems powered by millions of distributed energy resources: solar panels, EV chargers, heat pumps, and batteries owned by consumers and prosumers alike. The number of connected assets is growing rapidly, generating vast amounts of operational, commercial, and customer data. Managing this data reliably and consistently is one of the defining challenges of the next energy decade.
At the same time, digital energy platforms and new market entrants are intermediating the customer relationship, offering integrated propositions that bundle connectivity, flexibility, and billing into a single stack. Utilities that do not act risk being reduced to commodity providers.
To unlock the value of distributed energy resources, utilities need more than connectivity. They need data orchestration: a trusted, intelligent foundation that harmonizes information across every process, partner, and device and ensures they own rather than rent their energy transition capabilities.
From distributed assets to orchestrated intelligence
The SAP Distributed Energy Resources solution is designed to meet exactly this challenge. Built on SAP BTP, it enables utilities to manage distributed energy resources-related data at scale across production, consumption, and storage while helping to ensure reliability, performance, and consistency.
Rather than acting as an operational control system, SAP DER focuses on data orchestration and integration. It helps ensure that distributed energy resources data can flow seamlessly between operational, commercial, and analytical systems, providing a single source of truth that can connect the physical and digital worlds of energy.
“The complexity our customers face with prosumer data is exponential. They need reliability, performance, and consistency across all their data sources, and that’s exactly where SAP Distributed Energy Resources comes in.”
Kim Maren Ekrutt, Global Industry Business Unit Utilities Co‑Head, SAP
Two pillars of the SAP DER solution
1. Complex installation and prosumer data orchestration: technical and commercial foundation
Manage the full spectrum of prosumer-related data, covering both complex technical installation details, such as meters, solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, and heat pumps, and the commercial information required to operate distributed energy resources at scale. This includes customer and prosumer master data, product structures, tariffs, contracts, grid connection agreements, feed-in contracts, and all commercial relationships linked to each installation.
By bringing together technical asset data with commercial attributes and agreement information, the solution can provide a unified and reliable model of every installation. This is essential because distributed energy resources cannot be managed with technical information alone. Commercial products, grid contracts, flexible tariffs, and incentive agreements determine how energy flows are measured, settled, billed, shared, or monetized.
This pillar becomes the foundation for energy communities, virtual power plant participation, flexibility programs, dynamic pricing, capacity and congestion management, and any business model involving prosumers and distributed energy assets.
2. Energy management and sharing
Track and analyze how energy is consumed, produced, stored, and shared, enabling new energy community and peer-to-peer business models. With high-resolution energy data and intelligent allocation algorithms, utilities can offer transparent, fair, and regulation-compliant energy sharing services to residential and commercial participants alike.
Connecting data, processes, and people
Utilities already rely on SAP for mission-critical processes such as meter to cash, asset management, and customer experience. SAP DER can extend this foundation, linking every asset, agreement, and customer interaction within one coherent data model. This integrated approach helps turn technical data into business value, powering use cases such as smart tariffs, dynamic pricing, and energy sharing. For utilities, this means a single enterprise backbone that can connect the traditional meter-to-cash world with the emerging flexibility and distributed energy resources economy.
A partner ecosystem for the energy flexibility market
No single vendor can address the full breadth of the distributed energy landscape. SAP has assembled a curated ecosystem of specialist technology partners, each bringing deep domain expertise that complements SAP’s enterprise data platform. Data stays with the utility, business logic remains under their control, and the customer relationship belongs to them.
SAP’s technology partners extend the platform across six critical domains:
- Flexibility management and virtual power plants: Orchestrate and monetize prosumer assets, including EVs, batteries, heat pumps, and solar inverters, for flexibility markets and smart charging services.
- Energy communities and energy sharing: Design and operate energy communities with transparent allocation, dynamic local pricing, and full regulatory compliance.
- Grid congestion and capacity management: Forecast, detect, and resolve grid congestion at the low-voltage-network-level while unlocking flexibility revenues.
- Energy portfolio management and trading: Access wholesale and flexibility markets with real-time pricing, dynamic quotations, and risk management.
- Customer insights and energy disaggregation: Deliver behind-the-meter visibility through non-intrusive load monitoring and appliance-level analytics.
- Demand response and load management: Design and execute demand response programs, combining customer incentives, dynamic pricing, and automated device control.
“Our role is to help utilities master the growing data complexity and turn it into opportunity. With SAP Distributed Energy Resources and our partner ecosystem, we’re connecting data, processes, and partners into one intelligent platform that enables utilities to own their energy transition.”
Kim Maren Ekrutt, Global VP & Co-Head Industry Business Unit Utilities
About SAP Distributed Energy Resources
SAP Distributed Energy Resources provides utilities with a public cloud platform to help model, manage, and share distributed energy resources data across operational and commercial domains. Integrated with SAP’s core utilities portfolio and a curated global partner ecosystem, it can enable reliable data exchange, smart energy management, and customer-centric innovation for the distributed energy era.
Mateu Munar is senior director of Industry Business Unit Utilities at SAP.