In a six-part blog series, InEExS spotlights solutions to help accelerate Europe’s transition to a smart, resilient, competitive and more efficient energy system. Each blog will explore the solutions, technologies and approaches, from energy communities to the role of blockchain in energy management, that can make our homes and buildings smarter and more energy-efficient.
New Business Models for Integrated Services
The energy world has long been organised in silos. One company sells electricity, another delivers gas, a contractor upgrades insulation, and perhaps a separate firm manages solar panels or electric vehicle chargers. Each service has traditionally been offered in isolation, with little coordination. As the clean energy transition accelerates, these rigid boundaries are starting to blur. Integrated energy services are emerging, where a single provider or partnership offers a holistic solution across power, heat, mobility, and efficiency, tailored to customer needs.
The EU-funded InEExS project (Innovative Energy Efficiency Service Models for Sector Integration via Blockchain) is at the forefront of this shift. Through demonstration activities in Spain, Germany, Greece, and Scandinavia, InEExS is piloting new business models that integrate formerly separate sectors and foster collaboration across utilities, ESCOs, technology providers, and community cooperatives. By rethinking how energy services are packaged and financed, and by employing blockchain to manage complex multi-actor arrangements, InEExS aims to make sustainable energy solutions more attractive and accessible. However, achieving this integration requires overcoming entrenched practices, regulatory barriers, and proving that the models are economically viable.
The case for integration
Integrating services offers clear advantages. The simpler measures of the energy transition, such as switching to LED lighting or installing rooftop solar panels with feed-in tariffs, have already been widely adopted. Achieving further gains in efficiency and flexibility requires combining technologies. For example, a solar PV system paired with a battery or smart appliances optimises solar power usage. Similarly, integrating an electric vehicle into a home energy system can provide storage and flexibility services.
Consumers generally prefer a streamlined experience rather than coordinating multiple vendors. Integrated service models meet this demand, often through an Energy-as-a-Service offering. Instead of selling individual products, providers offer guaranteed outcomes, such as heating and cooling at lower cost and with greater comfort, using technologies like heat pumps, solar panels, and insulation behind the scenes. This approach aligns the provider’s incentives with performance and customer savings.
From a business perspective, integration opens new value streams. A traditional electricity retailer, for example, faces low margins selling kilowatt-hours. By offering additional services such as energy retrofits and electric vehicle (EV) charging management, they can increase loyalty and profitability. In the Nordic countries, InEExS supports a pilot where a traditional power retailer is evolving into a comprehensive service provider, using the Hiven platform to manage smart home energy services. Similarly, in Crevillent, Spain, the Enercoop cooperative is going beyond energy sales to engage its members through a digital app that guides usage, creating opportunities to bundle further services such as efficient appliances or community storage.
Another strong reason for integration is the ability to capture multiple benefits that would otherwise be missed. The InEExS concept explicitly includes non-energy benefits such as improved comfort, health, and maintenance services. For example, in Greece, the project combines smart boiler controls with remote maintenance support, enhancing both safety and reliability. It becomes possible to align landlord and tenant interests by offering immediate, tangible benefits beyond energy savings. Remote maintenance services, like smart boiler diagnostics, reduce operational costs by preventing emergency repairs and extending appliance life. Verified comfort and safety features, such as air quality monitoring, can raise rents, and enhanced reliability improves tenant retention. Additionally, shared savings models allow third-party financing, enabling landlords to earn service fees from tenant energy savings through bundled offerings like “comfort-as-a-service” contracts.
Pilots breaking the mould
The InEExS pilots provide practical demonstrations of integrated business models.
In Berlin, Germany, the project has expanded traditional Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) to include on-site renewable generation and tenant engagement. A public housing company partnered with an ESCOs to optimise the use of rooftop solar energy by tenants. Contracts are tracked by smart meters and verified through blockchain, ensuring transparent measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV). This model advocates for combining energy efficiency and renewable generation in a single service contract, potentially shortening payback periods and improving project viability. When tenant participation in solar self-consumption is high, energy savings from retrofits are substantial, and energy prices are elevated, then these retrofit projects are maximizing financial returns from both efficiency and on-site renewable generation.
In Crevillent, Spain, the Enercoop cooperative integrates supply and demand by providing real-time information on solar production, grid prices, and individual consumption patterns. Members are guided to optimise their energy use and are rewarded through a blockchain-based token system. This integrated approach blurs the traditional divide between generation and consumption. Enercoop’s familiarity and trust within the community provide a strong basis for expanding services, including financing rooftop panels, offering efficient appliances, or investing in shared community assets such as batteries.
In Greece, Heron, a gas utility, is using InEExS to evolve from selling gas by volume to offering heat-as-a-service. By installing smart controllers on customer boilers, Heron can optimise efficiency, reduce bills, and aggregate flexibility services. This move diversifies Heron’s business as gas consumption is expected to decline. It also demonstrates sector coupling by linking gas network operations with digital control systems, and potentially, in the future, with the electricity sector through hybrid heating systems.
The Nordic pilot integrates electricity supply with smart home services through the Hiven platform, where electricity retailers manage customer loads by controlling EV chargers and heat pumps. This model allows retailers to participate in flexibility markets and reduce wholesale costs, offering a service that goes beyond price per kilowatt-hour. Partnerships with technology providers and hardware manufacturers support the integrated offering.
Across all pilots, collaboration among utilities, ESCOs, technology vendors, legal specialists, and finance experts is essential. New contractual frameworks are being developed to clarify how value and risks are shared among the different parties. Outputs of the InEExS project include recommendations for innovative contracts and roadmaps to overcome regulatory barriers.
Supporting integration through regulation
The European Union is promoting energy system integration through policies such as the Energy System Integration Strategy and updates to key directives. The revised Energy Efficiency Directive encourages the inclusion of demand response and renewable generation in energy efficiency obligations. The Electricity Market Directive and the Renewable Energy Directive recognise citizen energy communities capable of engaging in multiple energy activities.
At the national level, countries such as Spain and Italy have streamlined regulations to support energy communities. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive promotes the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI), encouraging investment in integrated energy management systems capable of interacting with the grid.
In Germany, policies promoting “Sektorkopplung” (sector coupling) support the integration of electricity, heating, and mobility. Subsidy schemes increasingly reward combinations of measures, encouraging companies to offer bundled solutions.
However, tariff structures and incentives must also evolve. Integrated solutions depend on being able to recoup value across multiple streams, such as peak demand reduction, self-consumption, and flexibility services. Regulators must ensure that pricing signals and incentives support integrated approaches. Removing barriers that prevent companies from combining roles, such as being both an energy supplier and an energy service company, is also important, as the Berlin Energy Agency showcases.
The involvement of Verdia Legal in the InEExS consortium highlights the importance of legal expertise in developing new contract models that navigate complex regulatory environments.
Does integration pay off?
While the benefits of integrated models are clear, their commercial viability must be demonstrated. Selling integrated services involves longer and more complex sales cycles, customer education, financing arrangements, and coordination of installation and maintenance. A new role, the systems integrator, is essential to manage the entire package.
One of the innovative business models explored within InEExS is the concept of a Decentralized Energy Efficiency Power Plant (DEEPP). DEEPP aggregates multiple small-scale energy efficiency and flexibility measures, such as improved insulation, smart heating controls, and demand response actions, treating them collectively as a virtual power plant. By tokenising and verifying energy savings on a blockchain-based platform, DEEPP aims to create a portfolio of negawatts that can participate in energy markets similarly to conventional generation assets. Financing models such as Energy Savings Agreements or green bonds could be built around these aggregated savings, provided that the Measurement, Reporting and Verification processes are robust. Transparent tracking of savings helps reduce risk and build investor confidence, enabling broader deployment of integrated efficiency and flexibility services.
Blockchain-supported transparent MRV systems, such as those being developed in InEExS, can build confidence among insurers and investors. Transparent performance data makes it easier for third parties to finance or underwrite these projects, potentially enabling green bonds or aggregated flexibility portfolios to emerge.
Consumer acceptance for successful implementation of integrated services is vital. Some customers may welcome a single point of contact, while others may prefer to keep services separate. Integrated services raise privacy concerns, as companies managing EVs, heating, and solar systems gather large amounts of personal data. Therefore, clear data protection policies and transparent contracts are essential to build trust.
The societal benefits of breaking energy silos are significant. Sector coupling can improve overall system efficiency and reduce costs. Integrated approaches optimise the use of resources, for example by using excess renewable electricity to power heat pumps. Pioneering these models can give European companies a competitive edge and create new jobs in areas such as energy analysis, software development, and multi-skilled technical services.
The InEExS pilots produce toolkits and training materials to support wider replication across the EU, and can be found at the InEExS page of IEECP.
A glimpse of future energy service companies
In the future, fully integrated energy service companies could emerge, managing the entire energy estate of customers. These providers could install solar panels and batteries, retrofit buildings, provide EV chargers, manage heating and cooling, and even trade in energy markets, all under a single unified service contract. Customers would pay for outcomes, such as a lower carbon footprint or reduced energy bills, rather than individual technologies.
The diverse composition of the InEExS consortium, including cooperatives, private companies, agencies, and technology firms, suggests that a range of business models will coexist. Community-driven services, utility-driven services, and entrepreneurial startups will all play roles. Policy support will be crucial to ensure regulatory frameworks encourage integrated approaches and collaborative innovation.
The energy sector’s historical silos were a product of complexity rather than design. Breaking them requires systems thinking and collaboration. The LIFE programme’s funding of InEExS, focused explicitly on sector integration via business models and blockchain, signals the EU’s commitment to supporting both technology and business model innovation.
Initial results from the pilots, including improved self-consumption in Spain, successful performance-based contracts in Germany, consumer engagement in Greece, and flexible demand management in the Nordic countries, are promising. They show that integrated services can deliver greater value than isolated solutions.
As one InEExS participant noted, the project offers a unique opportunity for energy retailers, energy communities, technology developers, agencies, and real estate companies to validate, replicate, adopt, and roll out concrete technical solutions with potentially transformative impact.
If successful, future customers may be able to obtain a tailored, integrated energy service much like hiring a general contractor today. The fragmented landscape of energy suppliers and service providers could give way to unified service relationships, making it easier for consumers and businesses to adopt comprehensive clean energy solutions.
Breaking energy silos is challenging, but the potential benefits — in terms of system efficiency, flexibility, customer satisfaction, and sustainability — are substantial. The InEExS project demonstrates that by integrating technology systems, markets, and mindsets, Europe can build an energy system fit for the future.
Read more about the InEExS business cases:
Improved self-consumption of DER in Energy Cooperatives (Crevillent, Spain)
Recommendations for innovative energy contracts with Pay4Performance guarantees (Berlin, Germany)
Smart energy management for EV chargers and electricity- based HVAC appliances
DEEPP-Decentralized Energy Efficiency Power Plant
