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Podero Announces Industry-First Solution for Automated Day-Ahead Residential Solar Curtailment
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Today Podero announced a new capability enabling automated, market-steered curtailment of residential solar export. This cloud-based platform is the first in the industry to specifically address the growing financial challenge of negative day-ahead electricity prices for utility companies.
As the energy grid transitions, the rapid growth of residential solar power is creating a significant financial dilemma for utilities. Rooftop solar now accounts for 24% of Europe’s 338GW of cumulative solar capacity and is forecast to grow by 23-28GW annually. This success story, however, has an unintended consequence, contributing to a surge in hours with negative electricity prices.
In Germany, the market saw 457 hours of negative prices in 2024, a sharp increase from 301 hours in 2023. The trend is even more pronounced elsewhere, with Finland seeing negative price hours skyrocket from just 11 in 2020 to more than 650 in 2024. Historically, this has only happened momentarily, on the Intraday market. But as the renewable element of the grid builds, 2024 saw the first instances of negative day-ahead pricing across European countries from Poland to Spain.
During these events, utilities often face a "double penalty": paying homeowners a fixed rate for their exported energy while also paying the grid to accept that same power.
"The core of the problem has been the lack of a scalable way to manage household solar exports," explains Chris Bernkopf, Podero CEO. "Homeowners have no incentive to manually reduce output; they are often unaware prices have gone negative, and it's an unreasonable inconvenience to ask them to intervene. This leaves utilities to absorb the full, and growing, cost."
Podero's platform directly solves the day-ahead negative pricing challenge by integrating trading data with smart device steering.
How it works:
Using day-ahead price forecasts, Podero automatically schedules solar export curtailment when prices are expected to turn negative
Households still get free solar energy for their own consumption
Home batteries continue to charge from solar panels
Only the excess export to the grid is prevented
What this means:
Utilities avoid paying the grid to export the energy AND lessen their contribution to grid imbalance
Customers still benefit from free solar energy for home use and storage
Utilities can decide at a retail level whether to continue compensating solar exporters even when their panels are curtailed, e.g. to incentivise sign-up
And because Podero’s automated steering and trading enablement works in the cloud, the customer doesn’t have to buy any additional hardware. Podero simply requires a cloud-connected PV inverter and a simple and secure, user-controlled onboarding.
"We're giving utilities a precise tool to manage a growing financial pressure," adds Bernkopf. "By providing the automated day-ahead curtailment they need, we can help them avoid significant imbalance costs and support a more stable, economically viable energy transition. We are keen to partner with more solar inverter manufacturers to make this critical capability available to households across Europe."
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