Largely, the company has successfully differentiated itself from the sea of otherwise-indistinguishable smart grid service providers: With its active VPP deployments, tiko is one of the biggest real-time smart grids in the world. Their customizable, future-proof technology has the life-expectancy of a physical power plant and enables the delivery of the full spectrum of energy services, including the most sophisticated such as fast frequency response. Furthermore, tiko is the only company whichhas its platform certified by 3 European transmission grid operators and has been running its daily operations since 2013. Tiko fulfills the highest security standards which are also applicable to nuclear power stations, being one of the key characteristics for bundling and aggregation of distributed energy resources in the future. With more than 100 MW in residential assets connected, tiko has extensive operational experience and also delivers support to its partners within business case modelling, customer acquisition, and installation roll-out and customer support. With the possibility to read and control assets within 1 second or less, the solution offers all kinds of opportunities for new business models.
Not that their journey has been any easy. In order to provide such services to its partners, tiko pushes its own boundaries to offer cutting-edge solutions. “At the beginning, the main challenge was with the technical solution. There was a lot of doubt as to whether a pool of thousands of electrical heating systems could provide the same services as conventional power plants when it came to speed and reliability. In the meantime, this has changed and there is enough trust in technology, but implementing it with end-customers requires new ways of creating business cases and value propositions. With our experience, we are supporting our partners at this stage as well as during roll-out to minimize this hurdle.” This is achieved by a highly performant and creative team at tiko who has spent several years devoting themselves to the energy industry. What sets them apart is their deep knowledge paired with an international diversity that helps to bring a more global perspective to the solutions they design, giving their clients the opportunity to reach a wider base of potential key demographics. “We have employees of more than 15 different nationalities. Due to this cultural diversification, we bring different insights, thoughts, and mindsets together, which pushes each solution to its best and takes all kinds of challenges and opportunities into consideration. In addition, it makes it exciting and fulfilling to work with all the different cultural and personal backgrounds, challenging and further developing yourself every day,” says Trittin.
The company is committed to delivering technologies that enable the energy transition. At tiko, they strive to make the future of decentral energy as good as conventional power plants and perfectly integrated in day to day lives of the end-users.In 2019, the French energy company ENGIE became tikoʼs main stakeholder, supporting tiko’s further growth on the international market. Looking ahead, the company is planning to expand itself in emerging markets such as e-mobility; and has therefore started with its first projects in this field.
This Trittin says is imperative, “If we don’t do it who else should? There is no other planet Earth and we have the chance to influence and improve the future now.”