It’s Eurovision! Solar Startups Edition (Live from the SolarPower Summit)

It’s Eurovision! Solar Startups Edition (live from the SolarPower Summit) – with Jenny Chase and the European Solar Startup Award finalists

Recorded on-site at the SolarPower Summit in Brussels, this week’s episode captures the market developments and innovative young companies shaping Europe’s clean energy transition.

We kick things off with renowned BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase, who joins us to unpack why batteries have become the defining technology conversation across Europe’s solar sector. As PV penetration rates continue to increase and negative pricing events become more common, Jenny explains why in this next phase of development, the industry’s challenge is managing flexibility, storage, and increasingly volatile power markets.

The conversation touches on anticipated developments like changing energy-trading models, EV smart charging, and long-duration storage, while also exploring how software and intelligent asset management are becoming as important as the hardware itself. And Jenny flags battery revenue cannibalization as a trend to keep an eye out for.

The second half of the episode features interviews with the four finalists of the European Solar Startup Award, recorded directly after the competition finals at the summit:

• We speak with Sweden’s Qurrent about hybrid solar and battery optimization platforms designed to unlock new revenue streams for renewable assets.
• Finland’s Polar Night Energy explains how high-temperature sand batteries could provide low-cost industrial heat and long-duration storage using excess renewable electricity.
• Gridio discusses the growing importance of seamless EV smart charging and integrating electric vehicles with home solar systems.
• And finally, we hear from reLi Energy – the winner of the competition – on one of the battery sector’s most urgent emerging challenges: degradation management and how smarter operation of battery assets could dramatically improve long-term revenues and asset lifetimes.

From the summit location in Brussels, this episode of The smarter E podcast provides a snapshot of where the European energy transition is heading next.

Thank you to SolarPower Europe for the event invitation.

Jenny Chase is an analyst with BloombergNEF’s global Solar Insight Service. She joined BNEF mid-2005 and launched the Solar Insight Service in early 2006, and ran the team from Bloomberg's Zurich office until late 2022. She then stepped down from management and continues to write about and analyse the solar industry as part of the team.

Jenny is the author of two editions of the book Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, published by World Scientific Publishing in 2019. She holds a BA in Physical Sciences and an MSci in Physics from the University of Cambridge, England, and breeds award-winning West of England geese. She is on Twitter as @solar_chase.

Mats Lindelöw is Co-Founder and CEO of Qurrent, a Swedish energy-tech company building optimization and trading platform that maximizes revenue for BESS and renewables in European markets. Previously Managing Director at Svea Solar Sweden and consultant at McKinsey.

Markku Ylönen is Co-Founder and CTO of Polar Night Energy, a Finland-based energy technology company known for its Sand Battery, a high-temperature thermal energy storage solution. He holds a PhD in applied mechanics from Tampere University and Université Grenoble Alpes, with a background in power plant engineering, heat transfer, and flow dynamics. Since co-founding the company in 2018, he has led the development of innovative large-scale heat storage solutions that support the growth of renewable energy and mitigate climate change.

Konrad is the Co-founder and CEO of Gridio. Gridio offers a unique smart charging platform that directly integrates with car companies and inverters telemetries to schedule their charging automatically based on energy tariffs and home solar production - all without any hardware. Gridio boasts 150,000 app users across 25 european countries.

Before Gridio, Konrad spent 10 years studying and forecasting clean energy trends, electricity and CO2 prices, first in Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London and then in the world’s largest mining company BHP in Singapore. Konrad has an MSc in Energy, Environmental Technology and Economics from City University of London.

Laura Laringe is the CEO and Co-founder of reLi Energy, a software company that maximizes battery life and profitability by helping operators improve their operations. She is an expert in battery battery degradation and operations with a career spanning engineering and commercial roles in energy storage optimization at Vattenfall and several energy startups.