Digitize, monitor and control your grids with Venios’s award-winning solution

Power transmission and distribution is the crucial link in the energy system, and without it, many of today’s advancements, such as the Internet of Things would not be possible. Electrical power used to be produced centrally but is increasingly being produced by renewable energy plants, which then “travels” to your house through a system called the power grid. The grid is more than just transmission and distribution infrastructure; it is actually an ecosystem of asset owners, service providers, government officials, and manufacturers. To support the further electrification of our society, grids are to be modernized, and many utilities are searching for cutting-edge technologies to deliver electricity more efficiently and reliably. Many are now looking towards smart grid technologies to help reduce costs, increase efficiency and reliability and provide better transparency. For most of us, the primary concern with the electricity in our homes is limited only with the availability, but there’s more to it than what we see on the surface.

The energy system is being driven by three megatrends: digitilization, decarbonisation and decentralizaion. To stay on top of the challenges posed by these trends, the Venios Energy Platform (VEP) enables clients to digitize, monitor, and control their low and medium voltage electricity grids. Venios, founded in 2012, is an innovative software developer focusing specifically on the efficient handling of new challenges in energy supply. The company is based in Frankfurt, Germany, and is focused on helping utilities deal with the rapid energy transformation in the distribution grid. In order to do this, a real-time digital twin is created by feeding off available data sources. By giving utility transparency into these grid domains via intelligent real-time monitoring and control, VEP can assist in integrating renewable energy and electric vehicle charging and automating processes in the day-to-day management of the grid. VEP uses information about the grid’s current load state by combining data from geographic information (GIS), asset management and other systems. This allows a real-time calculation and depiction of the distribution grid, which is not the focus of classic SCADA systems due to the sheer volume and structure of the data in these domains.

In conversation with Dr. Jonas Danzeisen, Co-Founder and CEO of Venios GmbH

Q. Addressing increasing energy demand while simultaneously reducing overall carbon footprint is a difficult task. How do you help your clients adhere to strict government regulations?

By giving transparency and intelligence into the medium and lower voltage grids with VEP, Distributed System Operators (DSOs) get an operational grid management tool to assist in dealing with increasing volatility to ensure service levels remain high. The information and knowledge gained here can also form the basis for strategic grid planning. We allow clients to use social-economic data to calculate different scenarios so that one can make valid and reliable investment decisions about how your grid coverage of a specific area would need to be in 10, 15, or 20 years. The focus here is on the optimization of CAPEX and OPEX by utilizing savings and optimizing differences in the balancing group.

Q. How can clients benefit from your services?

We give clients a range of tools to deal with the many present and approaching challenges from handling e-mobility charging infrastructure to the integration of smart meter and intelligent transformer substations.

Q. Specialized IT solutions and consulting services come with an expensive price tag. How do you maintain your affordability and profitability?

By not only optimizing CAPEX but also saving on manpower needed for certain tasks, we often have a Return of Invest (ROI) on our projects of between 1 to 2.5 years depending on scope and application of VEP.

Q. Technology in energy management sector is constantly evolving. How do have qualified individuals who can maintain your service standards?

We are proud to have a team of highly qualified individuals headed up by the co-founder of Venios, Dr. Christian Köhler. Christian is CIO/CTO and his responsibilities range from product development to providing and planning the IT infrastructure for the Venios solutions. Christian is an expert in the field of information and computer sciences, so he is the key person for future technological breakthroughs regarding the development of new customer’s solutions. Venios has also received several awards for its innovative approaches, and current findings from our research and development are regularly presented and published. The majority of Venios staff consists of Ph.D. graduates in physics, electrical engineering, and computer science.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

We have recently launched an update that enables clients to add various layers of infrastructure such as fiber optics, administrate heating and piping networks into the live view of the grid, which further enhances the grid’s intelligence, and transparency.

Meet the leader behind the success of Venios GmbH

Dr. Jonas Danzeisen is the CEO and Co-founder of Venios GmbH. His responsibilities include sales, business development, and strategy development. Prior to launching Venios, Dr. Danzeisen worked in Transaction Services at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, on technology transfer projects at Daimler AG, and worked for a private equity fund. Dr. Danzeisen is an alumnus of Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he studied Materials Science and Engineering, and of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. After having gained experience as a consultant on electric vehicles for blue-chip clients, Dr. Danzeisen cofounded Venios in 2012. The initial aim of developing solutions for intelligently integrating electric vehicle charging stations into the electric grid quickly grew into a holistic smart grid approach. Since then, Venios has been at the forefront of smart grid technology in Germany, working in cooperation with most of the major grid operators and research institutions to make smart grids a reality.

“The Venios system is designed for the massive parallel processing of various data sources and models.”