Meet SAP

SAP is one of the world’s leading enterprise software companies. Headquartered in Germany and used by organisations across virtually every industry worldwide, their solutions help businesses manage their core operations, from finance and supply chain to human resources and data analytics.

Recently, RECreation platform, developed by INESC TEC, is available on SAP Store, which supports the planning, operation and management of renewable energy communities and collective self-consumption schemes. This milestone reflects INESC TEC’s commitment to bringing research-driven innovation to market and making it accessible to organisations around the world. 

Could you briefly describe how the collaboration between SAP and INESC TEC began, and what were the main drives for establishing this partnership? 

The relationship is considerably older than the RECreation work. SAP and INESC TEC first worked together within European research consortia, notably InteGrid under Horizon 2020, coordinated by EDP Distribuição with INESC TEC as technical coordinator, and more recently BeFlexible under Horizon Europe. In InteGrid the two organisations were direct collaborators rather than distant consortium members, working jointly on the grid and market hub platform and on data driven algorithms for the diagnosis and predictive maintenance of power transformers. BeFlexible extended that into flexibility markets and DSO to TSO cooperation. Those years established something that is difficult to create from scratch, which is mutual understanding of how each organisation works and where each one is strong. When SAP began developing SAP Distributed Energy Resources and turned to energy communities, INESC TEC and its RECreation platform were the obvious partner. The step from research collaboration to commercial partnership was therefore a short one. 

How do SAP’s technological and business capabilities complement INESC TEC’s scientific and sector-specific expertise? 

The European projects made the complementarity visible long before it was formalized. SAP brings the enterprise foundation: master data, measurement concept management for complex prosumer installations, energy data ingestion, validation and estimation, settlement input, and billing and invoicing through SAP S/4HANA Utilities, all extensible on SAP Business Technology Platform. That foundation is what allows an energy community to exist as a real commercial construct rather than as a pilot that ends when the funding does. INESC TEC brings the market design and algorithmic layer: energy sharing mechanisms, dynamic allocation coefficients, transaction pricing, financial compensation between members and optimization of flexible resources. It also brings continuous, peer reviewed research on how regulation differs across Portugal, Spain, France and other European markets, which no enterprise software vendor can replicate internally. 

The architecture reflects that division. RECreation integrates with the wider SAP for Utilities portfolio through SAP Distributed Energy Resources, which acts as both the integration point and the data backbone. SAP DER holds the installation and metering structures, the validated energy data and the link to assets, members and market roles, and it carries the results of the community calculation onwards into billing, invoicing and the customer relationship. INESC TEC therefore connects once, to a single trusted layer, rather than to each downstream system in turn. Neither capability delivers a complete answer alone. Together they cover the path from community design to customer invoice. 

The RECreation platform supports the planning, operation and management of renewable energy communities and collective self-consumption schemes. How does its integration with SAP Distributed Energy Resources strengthen SAP’s offering for utilities, energy service providers, and other customers? 

SAP DER holds the structural and data layer. It models the metering and installation structures of prosumers, ingests and validates energy data, manages the relationship between assets, members and market roles, and provides that data to the commercial processes that follow. RECreation adds the community intelligence on top: defining and maintaining the community structure, computing transactions and prices every fifteen minutes, calculating grid access tariffs for self-consumed energy, producing the billing guide, and supporting the planning of new community assets. For a utility, the practical result is that a renewable energy community can be created, operated, settled and billed within systems it already owns, using data it already controls. That matters commercially, because it lets utilities and energy service providers offer community propositions without handing the customer relationship or the underlying data to a third-party platform. 

How relevant is this partnership to SAP’s offering in the field of energy community management systems for utilities? 

It is central to it. Energy communities and collective self-consumption are moving from policy ambition to operational reality across Europe, and utilities are being asked to support them at a scale where manual processes stop working. The complexity is real: fifteen-minute settlement, dynamic and hierarchical allocation, multiple voltage levels, members holding their own supply contracts, and compensation flows that must reconcile with the retail bill. SAP does not intend to reimplement every national market design inside its own product. The approach is to provide an open enterprise backbone and to work with partners who hold the specialist logic. What makes INESC TEC particularly valuable here is that its work on these mechanisms was developed and validated in European demonstration projects with real DSOs, real consumers and real regulatory constraints. That gives SAP a tested answer when a utility asks how energy communities are handled end to end. 

How would you describe SAP’s experience of working with INESC TEC, and what makes it an innovation partner worth recommending to other companies? 

Several years of working side by side in European consortia gave SAP a clear view of how INESC TEC operates. It engages at the level of concrete data models, real measurements and actual regulatory text, not at the level of concepts, which makes joint work with customers efficient because questions get answered rather than deferred. It also delivers. In InteGrid and BeFlexible the commitments made at the proposal stage translated into working software and field demonstrations, which is not universally the case in collaborative research. Alongside that, INESC TEC brings academic rigor to problems the industry often treats loosely, and the published work behind RECreation gives a transparency that is unusual in commercial software discussions. For any company working on decentralized energy, a partner that understands both the physics and the market rules, and that can carry a research result through to a working platform, is worth a great deal. That is what makes INESC TEC worth recommending. 

Looking ahead, what can we expect from SAP over the upcoming years?  

SAP will continue to invest in SAP Distributed Energy Resources as the enterprise backbone for the flexibility economy, focusing on the areas where utilities need a trusted system of record: registration and lifecycle management of distributed assets, measurement and energy data management, energy sharing, flexibility, and the commercial processes that connect these to the customer. Alongside that, SAP is building a structured partner ecosystem, because no single vendor should attempt to cover device connectivity, market design and grid analytics on its own. Applied artificial intelligence will play a growing role, particularly in forecasting, anomaly detection and helping utilities make sense of prosumer data at volume. SAP also intends to remain active in European collaborative research, since that is where the market designs of the next decade are being tested. The direction is consistent: keep the platform open, keep the data under the utility’s control, and let specialists such as INESC TEC add depth where depth is needed.