Synergi's new PV Manager, co-developed with BKW, controls entire solar fleets without hardware

HELSINKI, Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Synergi, a Finnish energy technology company specialising in technical aggregation and control of distributed energy assets, launches PV Manager: a cloud-based solution that enables utilities, DSOs, and solar asset managers to remotely control, aggregate, and dispatch residential and C&I solar fleets as one single unit, through inverter cloud APIs to form or integrate to existing virtual power plants. PV Manager was developed in collaboration with European utility partners, with BKW in Switzerland among the earliest design partners.

Solar is the largest source of electricity in Europe, but with almost every panel generating at the same time, peaking in the middle of the day, the continent now produces large volumes of electricity during the same hours. This concentration pushes midday prices down and increasingly below zero. Oversupply has been triggering a wave of negative prices across Europe in 2025 and rising curtailment. As a response, countries across Europe like Switzerland and Netherlands are adapting regulations to discourage grid feed-in during periods of low or negative electricity prices. For example, Switzerland will begin implementing hourly spot-market-based feed-in tariffs from 2027, particularly affecting commercial PV systems of 150 kWp and above.

According to SolarPower Europe, the biggest challenge for the EU's solar fleet today is integrating it into power systems. Beyond rising curtailment, other issues such as grid congestion, and weakening project financials are putting growing pressure on the solar market. Therefore, turning existing inflexible solar assets into flexible ones is key to sustaining the sector's growth and securing revenue. Aurora Energy Research estimates that Iberian solar assets participating in ancillary services could earn up to 35% higher revenues. Without rapid deployment of solutions such as smart controls, demand response, battery storage, and grid digitalisation and expansion, solar's value will remain constrained.

Traditionally, asset control and flexibility have been managed through hardware because individual units have typically been several megawatts in size. Now, as smaller residential and C&I assets of as little as 10 kW and up become part of the energy system, market integration has to work differently. Instead of deploying hardware at every site, these distributed assets can be aggregated and controlled through OEM clouds.

Cloud-based aggregation is already being used for energy assets such as electric vehicles, where providers connect to car manufacturers' clouds to control charging and deliver flexible capacity. The same technology can now be applied to solar. By connecting to inverter manufacturers' cloud APIs and using technical aggregation technology, utilities, DSOs, and PV asset managers can aggregate capacity as a single flexible resource to curtail, trade, and ramp up distributed PV fleets without per-site hardware or on-site visits.

This type of cloud-based control addresses the gap in segments where hardware economics do not work. For instance, because storage costs spread more cost-efficiently over more kWh, coupling utility-scale PV with storage is significantly cheaper than doing so in the residential and C&I segments. Hence, battery attachment rates for C&I solar remain below 5% across the EU.

Synergi PV Manager is one of the first cloud-based control and aggregation solutions for solar assets. It allows utilities, DSOs, and asset managers to connect PV assets using OEM cloud credentials, aggregate and pre-pool capacity on Synergi's VPP engine, and monitor and dispatch their portfolio via API/MQTT from their own trading desk or control system — turning previously inflexible solar into VPP-ready capacity. In addition, it allows DSOs to control solar production per grid area and at transformer level. PV Manager supports SMA, Fronius and Huawei inverters in production, with other integrations in active development.

Utilities, DSOs, and asset managers start by connecting their residential and C&I solar assets via OEM portal credentials to the PV Manager portal, which can be white-labelled or Synergi-branded. The entire connection happens through the cloud — no hardware or on-site installations needed. Synergi's VPP technology then aggregates and pre-pools all connected assets into a single signal via, allowing the entire fleet to be controlled, dispatched, and monitored as one flexible resource with sub-one-minute latencies.

PV Manager was developed in collaboration with Swiss utility partners such as BKW who helped shape PV Manager by contributing operational requirements around multi-brand fleet management, emergency curtailment, and trading system integration.

"Europe spent a decade building solar capacity. The next challenge is making the capacity we already have respond to what the grid actually needs, hour by hour. The technology to do that through the cloud, without installing anything new on site, exists today," says Antti Hämmäinen, CEO & co-founder of Synergi.