Market View: RWE’s shared solar power energy platform Shine

The venture capital arm of RWE in Essen, Germany, has unveiled a pioneering new platform, Shine, which allows consumers to power their own homes and use, buy, sell and share locally-generated, renewable energy.

It is one of the first shared solar power energy systems to launch in the world and a similar platform could well be launched in the UK soon.

While Germany is the world’s leading market in terms of solar micro-generation, the UK has recently been catching up. In 2015 alone, the UK installed 3,700MW of solar power compared to Germany’s 1,460MW and 2,953MW in the rest of Europe. And despite cuts to the UK’s solar subsidies, industry experts believe that the UK will remain the top solar market in Europe in 2016.

Working with London-based proposition design consultancy Market Gravity, RWE created a new, disruptive proposition for the energy sector to bring a commercially viable, consumer-friendly product to the German market. The Shine software offers users an easy to use home energy management system, which allows them to optimise their own use of solar energy and connect to others for sharing, buying and selling locally-generated green energy.

Tested with customers across Germany, shine helps households to better understand their energy usage, and what steps they can take to become more independent and how to use more renewable energy. The challenge was to adopt agile working methods and launch the new venture within a tight time frame.

Julia Lynch-Williams, managing director for shine at RWE said: “We’ve have had positive feedback on shine from existing and new customers as well as from industry peers. Our vision is about ‘people powering people’ – helping consumers use more locally-generated renewable energy and this has really been brought to life with this launch.

“Our venture team is now ready for further development and growth, with the foundations in place for us to continue to develop the concept and lead disruption within the energy marketplace. We are exploring further markets to roll shine to, including the UK.”

She continued: “We wanted a team to roll their sleeves up and be part of the new venture team, not just act as consultants. The whole Market Gravity team worked this way and brought a huge amount of energy, momentum and experience to us. We achieved what we set out to do and have a foundation to now take the business forward in a way that focuses on the consumer as well as the technology.”.

Heidi O’Leary, principal consultant from Market Gravity, led the project for RWE. She said: “Shine is such an innovative concept for the energy sector and it was great to be a part of creating one of the first consumer to consumer energy sharing platforms in the market. We took a collaborative approach and worked closely with the RWE team in Germany to understand the challenges and customer frustrations and the insights we derived allowed us to simplify the concept and turn it into a consumer-friendly, appealing offering.

“Within ten weeks we had created a proposition unlike anything else in the energy space with a clear customer promise and product offering. And this really came to life once we designed the brand personality to cement the offer.”

“It is exciting to see the concept come to life and we look forward to seeing shine in action across homes in Germany as users embrace the benefits of using, sharing, buying and selling solar energy. We believe this could work equally as well in the UK and are exploring ways to help bring this innovation to UK consumers.”