Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are reshaping the energy grid by turning thousands of distributed IoT devices—solar systems, batteries, EV chargers—into one coordinated, cloud-native asset. At Enpal, we operate one of Europe’s largest residential solar fleets and are building a next-generation VPP platform to orchestrate it.

This talk explores what it really means to build a power plant in software—and why developing for IoT looks nothing like typical cloud app development.

You’ll learn:

1. How the electrical grid works (with examples!)

2. How a Virtual Power Plant works—from household solar to market bidding

3. How Enpal’s IoT and cloud systems coordinate to optimize energy use and revenue in real time

4. What design patterns (Kubernetes, KubeEdge, Dapr, event streaming) make it possible to treat 100,000+ homes like a distributed cluster

5. How VPPs make money—through flexibility markets, load shifting, and price arbitrage