Portfolio company Volue Acquires FlexPowerHub to strengthen Its position in Europe’s ancillary markets

Volue, a global leader in electrification and energy technology, today announced the acquisition of FlexPowerHub (FPH), a Salzburg-based provider of ancillary bidding intelligence that enables energy market participants to automatically generate optimal bids for the ancillary markets. By adding FPH’s bidding intelligence, Volue will enhance its multi-market optimisation and trading across all the markets its customers participate in. 
 

Ancillary Markets Are Becoming a Structural Edge 
 

Europe’s power system is becoming more volatile, more decentralised, and harder to predict. As variable renewables displace dispatchable generation, flexibility is becoming critical to keeping the system balanced, and the balancing markets that price it are growing in size and complexity. 
 

Market design itself is accelerating this shift: cross-border platforms such as PICASSO and MARI now coordinate aFRR and mFRR activation across most of the EU, settlement and bidding have moved to 15-minute resolution, and several TSOs have shortened cross-zonal gate closure times in step with new European regulation. At the same time, battery storage has become the fastest-growing source of balancing capacity, adding a more responsive, more price-sensitive class of bidder to markets that were built around slower, dispatchable plant.
 

For energy market participants, this creates both risk and opportunity. Those who can forecast accurately, optimise across markets and time horizons, and execute reliably hold a real structural advantage, and that advantage is widening at exactly the moment these markets are becoming harder to navigate. Decision windows are also multiplying and shortening, pushing ancillary bidding beyond what manual approaches can keep pace with — which is why raising the degree of automation is now a pressing priority, not a future one. 
 

Nowhere is this more visible than in the DACH region. German and Austrian TSOs were among the first to connect to PICASSO, and the region remains one of the most liquid and closely-watched balancing markets in Europe. The producers, traders, utilities, and aggregators operating there are under sustained pressure to forecast and execute with greater precision and speed than markets elsewhere in Europe currently demand, making DACH an early proving ground for the capabilities the rest of the continent will increasingly require.
 

New Capability for European Ancillary Markets 
 

FlexPowerHub brings deep domain expertise and an established presence in the DACH ancillary markets, automating bid generation across FCR, aFRR, and mFRR to maximize trading performance based on proprietary forecasts and customers’ individual parameters.  
 

Crucially, FlexPowerHub also provides an activation forecast in the energy market, predicting how much capacity will be activated in the balancing market. This delivers significantly improved predictability and planning capabilities for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) and other storage assets. 
 

Combined with Volue's suite of solutions, such as Optimeering, which forecasts real-time conditions across ancillary and imbalance markets, FlexPowerHub gives customers a materially stronger position from which to participate: automated bid strategies informed by proprietary forecasts, delivered on a platform with proven reliability in one of Europe's most demanding balancing markets. 
 

That capability matters most for the fastest-moving participants, including the growing fleet of battery storage assets whose bidding behaviour is reshaping balancing market dynamics across Europe. 
 

Leadership Perspectives
 

“The energy transition is rewriting the rules of how power markets work, and ancillary markets are where that rewrite is happening fastest. We believe the producers and traders who thrive in this new era will be the ones who can see further ahead and act faster than ever before across every market, not just one. FlexPowerHub gives us proven ancillary bidding intelligence today, and a clear path to bring that same multi-market edge to customers right across Europe. This is exactly the kind of capability we want to keep building: technology that lets our customers navigate complexity with confidence, wherever the market takes them next.” says Stephan Sieber, CEO Volue.
 

“We built FlexPowerHub because we saw how much value was being left on the table in the DACH ancillary markets. Joining Volue means we can bring our technology and expertise to a much wider set of customers, with the scale and distribution to make a real difference for producers and traders across the region and beyond.”says Martin Simmerstatter, Business Leader, FlexPowerHub.