Big News: Volue Acquires FlexPowerHub!
There are milestones that set a clear path forward: FlexPowerHub has been acquired by Volue.
Through this acquisition, we are joining forces—combining our automated bidding strategies for ancillary markets with Volue’s comprehensive platform solutions. Our shared goal: to provide energy producers, traders, utilities, and aggregators across Europe with seamless, automated multi-market optimisation from a single source.
Why Ancillary Markets Are Becoming a Crucial Competitive Edge
Europe’s power system is evolving at a fast pace: volatile renewables are replacing controllable large-scale power plants, making flexibility a critical resource for grid stability. In parallel, complexity in balancing markets is rising noticeably.
Key drivers of this development include:
- European Grid Integration: Cross-border platforms such as PICASSO and MARI coordinate aFRR and mFRR activations across Europe.
- Shorter Timelines: 15-minute settlement intervals and shortened gate closure times demand fast responses.
- The Boom of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS): Batteries introduce highly agile, price-sensitive capacity into the markets, fundamentally altering market dynamics.
Manual bidding processes are reaching their limits in this highly dynamic environment. Automated, precise market participation is no longer a future option—it is a necessity today. As one of the most advanced and liquid balancing markets in Europe, the DACH region (Germany and Austria) serves as an early proving ground for these capabilities.
New Capabilities for Flexible Assets and Battery Storage
At FlexPowerHub, we bring our proven automation solutions for FCR, aFRR, and mFRR, alongside deep domain expertise in the DACH region, to Volue’s portfolio.
A unique value-add of our technology: FlexPowerHub delivers not only capacity Merit Order Curve forecasts, but also precise activation rate forecasts for the energy market. Operators of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) and other storage assets can predict in advance how much of their offered capacity will actually be activated. This drastically improves planning accuracy and commercial certainty.
Combined with Volue’s existing analytics and forecasting solutions (such as Optimeering), this creates a powerful overall package: AI-powered, automated bidding strategies on a highly reliable platform.
What Does This Mean for Our Customers?
For you as a FlexPowerHub customer, nothing changes in your day-to-day operations except that you will benefit from an even stronger technology partner working behind the scenes. We remain fully focused on perfecting your bidding processes and look forward to driving new innovations forward together with Volue!
Direct Transmission Control: More Agility When Your Assets Need It Most
In the balancing market, every minute counts, especially when an asset experiences an unexpected outage or requires maintenance. Instead of cumbersomely disabling or completely deleting workflows in these situations, our customers now have direct and flexible control over all automated transmissions to the Transmission System Operators (TSOs).
Key Updates at a Glance
Edit Strategies Individually (Edit Function)
Strategies no longer need to be deleted and recreated to make adjustments. Via a new edit icon in the workflow view, the workflow mode for each market (Capacity Market, Energy Market, and Free Bids) can be toggled individually between automatic and manual.
The New “STOP TRANSMISSIONS” Button
For rapid responses during disruptions, a prominent red “STOP TRANSMISSIONS” button is now available.
- Immediate Effect: The entire process remains completely frozen until you explicitly turn it back on.
- No Data Loss: The automated bid transmissions stop right away, but the workflow remains intact and can still be managed manually.
- Easy Reactivation: Once the asset is operational again, the desired strategy components are simply set back to automatic using the edit function.
Additional Updates for Simpler Workflows
- Simplified Workflow Deletion: The confusing choices during deletion have been removed. There is now a direct, immediate deletion with a clear notice that to end a workflow in an orderly manner, the “Valid To” date should be used in the future.
- Valid From Today: Workflows (for example, for free bids) can now be created with the start date set to “today” and no longer strictly require a future date.
- Full Transparency in the Event Log: Every trigger of the stop button as well as any strategy adjustments are seamlessly logged (who, when, which workflow).
The Advantage? With the new transmission control, you retain full control over your assets even in critical moments. Fast, secure, and fully reversible.
Enhanced System Stability: Preventing Accidental Deletion of Strategies in Use
In the daily operation of balancing power processes, settings need to be adjusted quickly and smoothly. However, when systems and workflows are closely intertwined, seemingly minor actions can sometimes carry unintended risks: prematurely deleting a strategy in the Bid Generator that is still being used by an active workflow in the Bid Manager previously led to broken workflows and manual clean-up efforts.
With our latest system update, we are introducing an automated dependency check. FlexPowerHub now actively protects your bidding processes from misconfigurations and reliably prevents the deletion of active strategies.
What has changed?
Previously, checking whether a bidding strategy was still in use was performed solely on the client side within the user interface. Moving forward, a server-side protection mechanism takes over:
- Secure Real-Time Verification: Before a strategy can be deleted in the Bid Generator, the system performs a background check directly with the Bid Manager to verify whether any active workflows are still accessing it.
- Targeted Blocking on Conflicts: If the strategy is still linked to at least one active workflow, the deletion process is blocked on the server side. The strategy remains fully intact.
- Transparent Feedback: The user interface immediately displays a clear error message specifying the exact names of the workflows currently blocking the deletion. This lets you see at a glance where adjustments are needed.
- Fail-Closed Security Principle: Should the interface to the Bid Manager be unreachable during the check, the deletion is proactively blocked to eliminate any risk to your automated transmissions.
How to Adjust Your Workflows Correctly
If you want to delete a strategy in the Bid Generator that is currently still in use, the process is simple and secure:
- Check the Workflow: Use the system feedback to open the relevant workflow in the Bid Manager.
- Unlink the Strategy: Remove the strategy from the workflow or replace it with another one.
- Delete the Strategy: As soon as no active workflow references the strategy anymore, it can be deleted in the Bid Generator as usual.
Your Advantage?
Through automated cross-validation between the Bid Generator and Bid Manager, FlexPowerHub protects your bidding processes even more effectively against operating errors and unintended disruptions. For you, this means maximum configuration security and an even more robust day-to-day operation.
Intuitive Bidding: Optimising Strategy Management
In daily operations, transparency and intuitive operation are what counts. Over time, complex systems tend to carry along states that offer little practical value but can cause confusion. One such case was the previous status toggle for strategies (“Active / Inactive”).
With our latest system update, we are clearing things up: we are removing the concept of inactive strategies entirely. Moving forward, every bidding strategy created in FlexPowerHub is treated as continuously active.
What Does This Mean for Your Daily Operations?
Previously, alongside deleting a strategy, there was the option to set it to “Inactive” via a toggle in the user interface. In practice, operators who no longer need a strategy simply delete it. The “Inactive” state merely led to cluttered tables and unclear system states.
Key Updates at a Glance
- Simplified User Interface: In the strategy overview, the “Status” column—including the toggle button—has been removed. Your table is now leaner and focused purely on the essentials.
- Clear Logic: There is no longer a confusing in-between state. If you no longer wish to use a bidding strategy, you simply delete it directly.
- No Impact on Price Limits: The active/inactive toggling of individual price limits within a strategy remains unaffected by this change and continues to be available to you as usual.
Cleaner Code for Greater System Stability
Under the hood, this clean-up brings decisive advantages as well. By removing duplicate database fields and outdated validation logic, background bid generation is executed even more directly and robustly.
For you, this means a straightforward tool, a clutter-free dashboard, and maximum clarity across all your bidding processes!
The Power of Precision: How FlexPowerHub Capitalized on Q2’s Balancing Market Swings
The second quarter of 2026 was characterized by extreme, shifting market dynamics, which FlexPowerHub (FPH) leveraged highly successfully. While massive revenue gains in the negative balancing capacity market (aFRR-) dominated in April and May, prices in the positive markets (aFRR+) exploded in June, whereas the negative markets cooled down noticeably. Across all phases, FPH managed to efficiently convert this volatility into high revenues through precise forecasting, partly significantly outperforming general market growth or successfully cushioning market downturns.
The foundation of this success was an excellent bid acceptance rate, which reached peak values of up to 96% across the board in May and was maintained at an outstanding 93% to 95% in the positive markets during a volatile June. Only in the cooling German aFRR- segment did this rate experience a one-off sharper decline to around 74% in June. In parallel, forecasting performance proved to be exceptionally robust: during the steady phases of May, it rose to near-perfect values of up to 98%. Although the unpredictable price explosion in June briefly challenged the models in the positive segment, forecast accuracy shone again with strong precision ranging from 85% to 94% in the normalizing negative markets towards the end of the quarter.
