Inion Launches 160 MW VPP Platform With White-Label European Play

In a warehouse district on the outskirts of Vilnius, a startup has wired together thirty separate energy assets, batteries, solar arrays, and wind plants scattered across Lithuania, and is now bidding their combined 160 MW of capacity into the national balancing market as though it were a single power station.

The company behind it is Inion Software, and the launch, reported by ESS News on 14 September 2026, arrives at a moment when distributed energy resources are spreading across Europe faster than grid operators can absorb them. Software that bundles those scattered assets into one controllable, market-ready portfolio has become one of the most commercially contested corners of the energy transition.

What makes this more than a Baltic story is the commercial model. Inion is offering its system as a white-label product, meaning other energy firms can rebrand it as their own. Here is what the platform actually does, how that commercial model is meant to work, and what stands between the company and the pan-European ambition it has declared, no prior knowledge of virtual power plants required.

What Inion’s platform does and how it links 160 MW of distributed assets

The counterintuitive part is the coordination. Thirty physically separate sites, each with its own equipment and its own connection to the grid, are treated by the software as one dispatchable unit that can respond to a single market signal.

According to Sarunas Stanaitis, CEO of Inion Software, the platform runs on off-the-shelf hardware installed at each energy site, with the company’s proprietary software handling the connection and the control logic between that equipment and the platform itself. The hardware is standard. The intelligence sits in the layer above it.

The granularity is where the engineering shows. Multiple battery containers located at the same facility can each be controlled independently, receiving their own charge and discharge instructions on a daily schedule rather than moving in unison.

That detail matters more than it first appears. Dispatching individual containers separately within one site is what separates a genuine control system from a simple aggregation layer, and it is that precision that makes participation in balancing markets commercially viable. The more finely a portfolio can respond to frequency signals, the more revenue it can earn per megawatt.

The precision of that dispatch logic connects directly to how battery storage revenue streams are structured: frequency containment reserves, automatic restoration, and intraday trading each pay differently depending on response speed and portfolio depth.

The platform is built to participate across multiple balancing market types at the same time, not one after another. Those markets cover both frequency regulation and energy trading:

• Frequency containment reserves
• Automatic frequency restoration reserves
• Manual frequency restoration reserves
• Day-ahead trading
• Intraday trading
• Customised trading arrangements

Stanaitis identified the integration itself as the company’s central strength.

“Hardware-software integration is one of our core strengths, and it is frequently one of the most challenging components of VPP deployment,” said Sarunas Stanaitis, CEO of Inion Software.

For anyone weighing the commercial claims that follow, this architecture is the foundation. What the platform can bid, how precisely it can respond, and therefore how much it can earn all trace back to that control layer.

The white-label model and what European expansion actually requires

The ambition is straightforward to state. Inion wants energy companies and aggregators outside Lithuania to take its platform, put their own brand on it, and run it as their own product, while Inion supplies the software and integration underneath.

On paper, that is an elegant way to scale. The company does not need to build a retail energy brand in every new country; it just needs paying customers who already have one.

Then the regulatory reality arrives. Every European country runs its own balancing market rules, its own transmission system operator requirements, and its own aggregator frameworks, even under the European Union’s overarching balancing regulation. Each new market Inion enters requires the platform to speak a different regulatory language.

The regulatory fragmentation Inion faces is reinforced by the uneven maturity of independent pricing infrastructure across European balancing markets, where national TSOs still apply divergent methodologies for settling reserve bids even as pan-European platforms like MARI and PICASSO seek to standardise the exchange layer.

The EU has been working to narrow those gaps for years. Commission Regulation (EU) 2017/2195, known as the Electricity Balancing Regulation, sets harmonised rules and mandates common European platforms for exchanging balancing energy. But national implementation still varies, and the platforms that stitch it together, MARI for manual reserves and PICASSO for automatic frequency restoration, are still being rolled out across TSO jurisdictions.

Where regulatory fragmentation bites hardest

For a white-label provider, fragmentation is not a distant policy concern. It is a direct product-development cost.

ENTSO-E’s Network Code on Demand Response explanatory document (May 2024) acknowledges that integrating aggregators into existing balancing frameworks still requires amendments to settlement and market rules. That means each new country brings separate compliance work, fresh TSO integration, and its own mapping of product definitions before a single megawatt can be bid.

There is a home-market blind spot too. Detailed Baltic-specific balancing rules are not publicly documented, which means the experience Inion has built in Lithuania may not transfer cleanly to adjacent markets. The economics of expansion therefore hinge on how quickly that fixed compliance cost can be spread across paying customers.

A fast-growing market with a competitive ceiling

The opportunity, by the headline numbers, is substantial. The problem is that the headline numbers disagree with each other, and the most grounded view of them is considerably more modest.

Here is the spread of analyst estimates for the European VPP market:

• Grand View Research (updated April 2026): USD 1.50 billion in 2024, projected to reach USD 4.76 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 21.3%
• Market Data Forecast (July 2026): USD 2.70 billion in 2025, projected to reach USD 48.04 billion by 2034 at a CAGR of 37.7%
• BIS Research (January 2026): USD 1.22 billion in 2024, projected to reach USD 5.37 billion by 2035 at a CAGR of 14.48%

Those forecasts diverge sharply, from a compound annual growth rate of roughly 14% to nearly 38%, depending on methodology and time horizon. That range alone should temper any single figure being treated as authoritative.

The investor view from SET Ventures (2025 investment thesis) grounds the picture. It estimates the currently addressable VPP market in Europe at under 1 billion euros, well below the market-research valuations, because VPP operators typically capture only around 10% of traded flexibility value. Its analysis puts flexibility value at roughly 100,000 euros per MW and total addressable potential at about 13 billion euros by 2030.

Record European battery additions in 2025 mean the raw asset base that VPP platforms like Inion’s are designed to aggregate is growing sharply, which both expands the addressable market and intensifies competition among software providers for the same pool of distributed assets.

“The market is still small, under 1 billion euros today, and crowded, requiring rapid land-grab of hundreds of thousands of DER assets for meaningful commercial outcomes,” according to SET Ventures’ 2025 VPP investment thesis.

The read for you is this. The gap between the glossy market-research valuations and what platforms actually earn tells you Inion is entering a market where the opportunity is real but the economics reward scale, not early arrival. Against that backdrop, 160 MW is a credible proof-of-concept for a startup, but it is small relative to what pan-European relevance demands.

What the launch signals and what comes next for European VPP aggregation

The genuine question the launch raises is not whether the technology works. It is whether the white-label model is the right commercial structure for a regulatory environment that keeps fragmenting at the national level.

The model has a clear logic. It lets Inion grow without building a consumer-facing energy brand in every market. The trade-off is visibility: white-label partners can become concentrated revenue with the customer relationship owned by someone else, which makes retention the central commercial variable.

The demand side is moving in Inion’s favour. DER deployment across Europe is accelerating, and ENTSO-E’s NC DR explanatory document (May 2024) frames demand response and aggregators as key contributors to balancing, with amendments underway to integrate them more fully into balancing frameworks. That is a policy tailwind for platform operators, with SET Ventures putting the total addressable potential near 13 billion euros by 2030.

The policy tailwind Inion is riding reflects a structural supply shortfall: the EU energy storage gap remains wide enough that analysts continue treating deployment acceleration as an investment signal rather than a transient trend.

The unresolved question is speed. Can Inion replicate its Lithuanian balancing-market integration across multiple TSO environments fast enough to build an advantage before better-capitalised European competitors close the gap?

Three variables will determine the answer:

• The speed of cross-border regulatory integration
• The retention rate of white-label customers
• The pace of DER growth across target markets

For anyone tracking the energy transition, the signal is where the competitive frontier now sits. Small operators with sophisticated software can contest balancing markets that were once the preserve of utilities, but regulatory complexity and market crowding will sort the field quickly.

Proof of concept, not proof of scale

Strip away the ambition and here is what the launch actually establishes: operational proof that Inion’s software can aggregate heterogeneous distributed assets, 30 of them totalling 160 MW, and participate across multiple balancing market types simultaneously, live in Lithuania’s market as of 14 September 2026.

That is a real achievement. It is also the first milestone, not the destination. Because the strategy is white-label, the next meaningful proof point does not belong to Inion alone; it depends on a third-party aggregator deploying the platform successfully in a second jurisdiction.

The broader takeaway for readers following energy technology is that VPP software is becoming infrastructure-grade. Multiple analysts project strong growth regardless of the exact base figure, so the opportunity window is real even if its size is contested. The technical barrier to building a working platform has fallen sharply, which shifts competitive advantage toward regulatory navigation, partnership quality, and the speed of geographic replication.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and financial projections are subject to market conditions and various risk factors.