How Podero and the Bosch Home Comfort Group are building the infrastructure for Europe’s flexible energy grid – one connected device at a time.

On December 9, 2025, a message appeared in our team Slack: “Is this the first Bosch/IVT onboarding?” The reply came back almost immediately: “It is.”

No champagne. No press conference. Just a quiet confirmation that months of integration work had resulted in a household’s IVT heat pump being connected, for the first time, to a utility’s smart energy services through the Podero platform, powered by the Bosch Home Comfort Group’s Partner Web API.

That single onboarding might sound small. It’s not. It represents something the European energy industry has been talking about for years but has struggled to execute: turning distributed residential heating devices into a coordinated, intelligent fleet that can respond to real-time energy markets. A virtual power plant, built not from turbines or batteries, but from the heat pumps already sitting in people’s basements.

The problem nobody wants to talk about.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about heat pump optimization in Europe: most utilities still treat heat pumps as ‘dumb load’. They know these devices consume significant electricity. They know that smarter control could reduce costs for consumers and create grid flexibility. But the path from “knowing” to “doing” is blocked by a problem that’s more organizational than technical.

To build a meaningful virtual power plant, you need scale. Thousands of connected devices, not dozens. But to convince homeowners to connect their devices, you need to offer them real monetary savings. And utilities are reluctant to offer those incentives until they have a fleet large enough to generate value through energy trading and demand response. It’s a classic cold-start problem, and it’s why most smart grid software initiatives in this space stall at the pilot stage.

The lack of interoperability doesn’t help. Heat pumps come from dozens of manufacturers, each with different connectivity standards, APIs, and data models. A utility wanting to offer a smart heating product to all its customers can’t just integrate with one OEM. They need a demand response management system that works across brands (Bosch, IVT, Buderus, and beyond) without asking homeowners to install new hardware or change their routines.

Why the Bosch integration changes things.

The collaboration between Podero and the Bosch Home Comfort Group isn’t a pilot. It’s a production integration, already live and serving real households across multiple European markets.

The architecture is straightforward in concept, complex in execution. Bosch Home Comfort Group provides the IoT connectivity layer through its Partner Web API; a secure, webhook-based interface that gives real-time access to data and controls across its entire heating portfolio, including IVT (widely installed across Scandinavian homes) and Buderus. Podero’s energy management platform sits in the middle, orchestrating device-level optimization in real time: deciding when to heat more aggressively (when electricity is cheap) and when to coast (when prices spike), all within comfort boundaries the homeowner never notices.

The part that matters most for the energy transition, though, is what happens upstream. Podero’s platform connects the optimized heat pump fleet directly to a utility’s energy trading operations, enabling energy management teams to incorporate residential flexibility into their market activities. This is where smart heating stops being a consumer feature and becomes grid infrastructure.

For homeowners, the experience is invisible. The optimization can deliver significant reductions in heating costs, with no additional hardware, manual adjustments, or compromise on comfort. For utilities, it’s a new energy product category that deepens customer relationships while creating trading value. For Bosch, it proves that their connected device ecosystem can operate at utility scale, future-proofed.

What we learned building this.

Multi-party integrations across OEMs, utilities, and software platforms are harder than any press release will tell you. 

Have patience

• Different device models report data differently; expect edge cases to be the norm, not the exception.
  

• Getting real-world consumption data right – mapping correct data points across heating, hot water, and total electrical consumption – will require patience and iteration. 

OEM platform design

• Bosch’s mature connected platform made a meaningful difference here.

• Their Partner Web API isn’t a bolt-on; it’s built on top of a comprehensive IoT infrastructure that already supports features like automated error code notifications and remote diagnostics.

• That depth of device intelligence gives us a foundation that goes well beyond simple on/off control, and opens the door to capabilities like predictive maintenance (that many heat pump OEMs simply can’t offer yet).

• It allows Podero to build on a solid foundation, rather than working around limitations.

OEM API team strength

• Bosch’s Partner Web API team was consistently responsive and technically excellent.

• Their API documentation was strong, but when edge cases came up, the team engaged directly in joint debugging rather than just pointing to docs.

• This makes a material difference in integration speed.

Partner culture with real world incentives

• Real customer demand pulls a partnership forward. Having an active utility customer using Bosch/IVT devices helped Bosch prioritize this integration work.

• This didn’t feel like a vendor-client relationship. When issues arose (e.g. mapping consumption data across different device models), Podero & Bosch teams worked them through together.

• Seasonal considerations provide positive pressure; the October launch window for the heating season acted as valuable deadline.

The lesson we keep coming back to: the hard part isn’t the technology. It’s aligning the incentives across a true partnership. Utilities are naturally cautious. OEMs want to protect the customer experience. Homeowners want savings without hassle. An energy flexibility platform has to serve all three simultaneously, and that’s a product design challenge as much as an engineering one.

A European blueprint.

Bosch’s heating portfolio spans global and regional brands (IVT, Buderus, Hitachi, YORK), each with significant installed bases across different European markets. IVT alone is one of the most common heat pump brands in Scandinavian homes, which means thousands of households already own the compatible hardware. They just need the software layer to unlock its potential.

What Bosch builds ends at the device API; what Podero builds starts there. Neither can deliver the full value chain alone.

The integration Podero has built with Bosch is designed as a template: a repeatable model for how OEMs and energy flexibility platforms can work together to bring virtual power plants to any market where utilities are ready. The architecture doesn’t stop at any single border.

And the optimization is still getting smarter. The current integration already delivers meaningful savings, but more sophisticated steering strategies are in development; approaches designed to increase value for both the homeowner and the grid without increasing total energy consumption. The flywheel is starting to turn.

What this means for the industry.

The energy transition won’t be powered by any single technology. It will be powered by the unsexy, unglamorous work of connecting existing infrastructure – heat pumps, smart meters, trading systems, customer apps – as a smart, integrated ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts.

What Podero and the Bosch Home Comfort Group have built together is proof that this work can move beyond pilots and into production. That utility software can bridge the gap between an OEM’s hardware and a trading desk’s algorithms. That a homeowner can save money on heating while, without knowing it, helping to balance the grid.

That’s the future we’re all building. One connected device at a time.

If you’re a utility exploring smart energy products, or an OEM looking to unlock the flexibility in your connected devices, we’d love to talk about what this model could look like in your market.