Heat, Flexibility & Intelligence

SET Award 2026’s Clean Energy & Storage Innovators

The electricity grid used to be simple: power flowed one way, from large plants to passive consumers. That world is gone. Today’s grid is a two-way negotiation between millions of distributed assets: rooftop solar, home batteries, EV chargers, industrial heat pumps. The companies that can orchestrate that chaos stand to reshape how we keep the lights on. Clean Energy & Storage is the largest category in SET Award 2026, with 39 companies, and the most technically mature, with 79% of solutions at late stage and nearly one in five already profitable.

According to the latest figures from Net Zero Insights, the SET Award 2026 Clean Energy & Storage cohort has raised a combined total of over $622 million. Software leads at 51% of solutions, reflecting investor appetite for asset-light models that scale without building physical infrastructure from scratch. The top challenge cited across the category is adapting to policy and regulation, higher than in any other SET100 group – a reflection of the grid connection backlogs that continue to slow renewable deployment across Europe.

First up, we’ll meet the winner, Flower – Sweden’s market-leading battery storage trading and optimisation platform, which is making green electricity reliably predictable. Then we’ll introduce the two finalists: Alternō, a Singapore-based start-up storing renewable energy as heat in sand, salt, and steel; and Tilt Energy, which turns commercial buildings into active participants in the energy market. Lastly, we’ll look at how dozens of other innovators are tackling everything from battery recycling to grid cybersecurity. What they all have in common: they’re proving that the messiest, most complex part of the energy transition, the grid itself, is exactly where the most exciting solutions are emerging.

Winner: Flower – Making Green Electricity Predictable

The core problem with renewable energy isn’t that there’s too little of it. It’s that it arrives at the wrong times. Flower, headquartered in Stockholm, has built a platform that solves exactly this: it aggregates batteries, wind farms, solar installations, and EV chargers, then dispatches them across European balancing and spot markets in real time to smooth out the gaps.

What sets Flower apart is the full-stack nature of the offer. Asset control, prequalification, optimisation, trading, and PPA offtake all sit within one platform. Its Green Baseload electricity contracts give energy-intensive industries access to renewable power that’s stable enough to plan around, and whose value increases as grids get more volatile, not less. With over €100 million raised and operations across Sweden, Denmark, DACH, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, Flower is already the most financially-backed flexibility actor in the Nordics.

Finalist: Alternō – Storing Energy in Sand

Sand doesn’t sound like the future of energy storage. But Alternō, founded in 2023 in Singapore with operations in Vietnam, has built a non-explosive storage system that delivers both industrial process heat at 300–600°C and electricity from a single unit. The materials – sand, salt, and steel – are globally abundant, fully recyclable, and dramatically cheaper than lithium.

Its two products serve the food processing, agriculture, and data centre sectors: Alternō Thermal stores renewable energy as high-temperature heat, while Alternō Electricity converts that stored heat back into power. Customers include PepsiCo and Mondelez, and manufacturing expansion is underway in Japan. By maintaining full control of its supply chain from R&D to production, Alternō can move from science to real-world deployment faster than competitors — and its ambition is to avoid 100 million tonnes of CO₂ annually by 2030, a number that sounds large until you consider how much industrial heat is still generated by burning fossil fuels.

Finalist: Tilt Energy – Turning Buildings into Power Plants

Commercial buildings consume enormous amounts of electricity. Most of that consumption is invisible to the grid and treated as passive demand rather than a flexible resource. Tilt Energy, based in Paris and certified by French grid operator RTE, changes that.

Its AI platform works across three pillars: forecasting load profiles using algorithms trained on thousands of curves and adjusted in real time for weather and usage; orchestrating heating, cooling, ventilation, EV charging, and battery assets to provide flexibility and avoid fossil backup generation; and trading algorithmically on spot and balancing markets to maximise customer value. The result is entirely CAPEX-free for the customer. Clients include Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Métropole du Grand Paris, and having raised €5 million in 2025, Tilt is now expanding to the Netherlands and Switzerland. The buildings were always flexible. Tilt just gave them a way to get paid for it.

More Innovators Energising the Market

Grid Flexibility, VPPs & Demand Response

• Delta Green (Czech Republic) aggregates residential batteries, PV, and EV chargers into a virtual power plant, rewarding households for helping balance the grid
• AGEERA (Israel) uses AI to optimise energy storage and VPP operations, managing 1.4 GWh including the world’s first Multi-OEM BESS under unified management
• Powernaut (Belgium) centralises asset management, trading, and billing for energy retailers in a single Flexibility Workspace; named Product of the Year at the Future of Energy Awards 2024
• Flexa (Germany) links residential solar and batteries into a VPP, using AI to trade aggregated energy on the market and lower household costs
• Einklang (Germany) combines battery storage with dynamic electricity contracts, helping businesses cut energy costs by up to 50%
• SPiNE (Germany) connects solar, batteries, and EV chargers across brands through a unified edge platform, building the interoperability layer for decentralised energy
• Klik Energy (Colombia) uses AI to turn electricity from a fixed cost into a profit engine for Latin American industrial clients
• Previse Systems (Switzerland) offers Coral, a cloud-native ETRM platform serving Ørsted, SEFE, and EnBW; winner of Best Cloud-Based ETRM System 2025
• Zählerfreunde (Germany) gives utilities a white-label platform to launch smart energy apps with dynamic tariffs, live with over 30 partners
• Ogre AI (Romania) delivers high-accuracy energy forecasts across six dimensions for clients including E.ON and Verbund
• rebase.energy (Sweden) provides an API-first forecasting platform for energy traders, with Shell, E.ON, and Hitachi Energy among its customers
• Tether (Spain) turns parked EVs into a grid flexibility resource using only AI — no hardware required; validated with Audi and Zeekr

Energy Storage & Battery Innovation

• Polar Night Energy (Finland) stores renewable electricity as heat in sand for days or weeks, supplying district heating networks with a long-duration fossil-free alternative; one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025
• Elementium Materials (USA) designs electrolyte molecules that extend LMFP battery cycle life from 2,000 to 5,000 cycles
• NEU Battery Materials (Singapore) recycles LFP batteries using only electricity and water, emitting five times less carbon than conventional methods
• Zhejiang Huayou Green Energy (China) recovers LFP cathode material through direct regeneration, outperforming hydrometallurgy on emissions and cycle stability
• WERER Energy (Türkiye) manufactures modular lithium battery packs with integrated inverters and smart BMS, scaling from portable units to megawatt containers
• NantG Power (USA) develops ultra-high-performance lithium-ion cells using AI and advanced nanomaterials for EVs, aviation, and grid storage

Grid Infrastructure & Digital Monitoring

• AssetCool (UK) applies photonic coatings to overhead lines, boosting capacity at up to 20 times lower cost than reconductoring; winner of Free Electrons 2025 Start-up of the Year
• Neara (UK/Australia) builds physics-enabled digital twins of electricity networks to optimise capacity and model resilience against extreme weather; one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies 2024
• Enline (Portugal) provides digital twin software for transmission lines, increasing capacity by up to 50% and reducing losses by 30%
• Sapphire Technologies (USA) manufactures turboexpanders that convert wasted pressure in gas systems into clean electricity
• atmio / M2Tech (Germany) automates methane leak detection and EU-compliant reporting for gas network operators
• WeavAir (Poland) fuses satellite imagery, drone data, and IoT sensors into digital twins for decarbonisation monitoring and carbon offset generation
• Aevy (Norway) automatically extracts information from asset documentation to streamline renewable energy due diligence
• GridBrid (Belgium) automates hybrid power plant feasibility modelling, generating bankable investment insights in minutes

Solar & Renewable Innovation

• Solfium (Mexico) helps corporates decarbonise their value chains through distributed solar, connecting SMEs with certified installers and financing
• ENVIRIA (Germany) delivers integrated solar, storage, EV charging, and energy management for commercial clients with no upfront investment
• ChemiTek (Portugal) produces biodegradable cleaning and protection solutions for solar panels, operating in over 70 countries
• DARBCO Robotics (Jordan) automates solar panel cleaning with patented robots and an IoT monitoring platform, saving 15 million litres of water annually
• Pix Force (Brazil) applies computer vision to automate visual inspection of energy infrastructure

Hydrogen & Fuel Cells

• PowerUP Fuel Cells (Estonia) develops portable hydrogen fuel cell generators as a zero-emission alternative to diesel for defence, healthcare, and off-grid use
• ReCatalyst (Slovenia) produces platinum-based catalysts using a nanotech platform that reduces platinum use by up to 60%

Cybersecurity for Energy

• SaiFlow (Israel) fuses power telemetry with network data to detect cyber-physical threats in real time; winner of the NextEra Energy Global Start-up Seed Competition 2024
• Cyber Energia (UK) offers a SaaS cybersecurity platform for renewable energy infrastructure, covering NIS2, IEC 62443, and supply chain risk

Carbon Markets

• Fuel Switch (South Africa) uses blockchain to enable transparent carbon credit and REC trading, channelling revenue into rural electrification across Africa

The common thread across all 39 companies is a shift in how we think about the grid — from a one-way delivery system to a platform for trading, optimising, and securing energy at every level. The technology is largely ready. The bottleneck, as the companies here know better than most, is the regulatory infrastructure catching up.