Vision.

For a century electricity was scarce, so the product was the unit of energy and the margin belonged to whoever controlled generation. Every part of the industry was designed around that scarcity: large plants, long contracts, annual prices, passive customers.

Scarcity has moved. On a sunny afternoon the Baltic price regularly falls below zero. At seven in the evening it climbs again. The same kilowatt-hour is worth nothing at noon and a great deal at dusk.

When a commodity becomes abundant, value migrates to its scarce complement. In electricity the scarce complement is flexibility: the ability to shift demand, store supply and answer the grid within seconds. Flexibility cannot be sold on a fixed-price contract. It has to be computed for every device every 15 minutes.

Retail electricity is as close to perfect competition as a market gets. The product is identical. Every supplier trades the electrons on the same exchange. Customers can switch supplier in minutes. In perfect competition profit goes to zero, so the industry defends its margin the only way left to it: opacity. Fixed prices with an embedded premium. Bundles that cannot be compared. Contracts written to be forgotten.

We have no interest in winning that game. A cheaper version of the same product is a race to the bottom with better marketing.

Volton sells what a supplier structurally cannot: an ecosystem. Electricity at the exchange price, the devices that move consumption to the cheapest hours, an app that shows every euro earned and spent and a licensed route into the markets that pay for flexibility. Each part makes the others worth more. A supplier sells a contract. We sell the system around it. And we publish our margin. Transparency is not a virtue. It is a weapon that only the company without a hidden margin can use.

The old energy company scaled with capital and labour. Every new customer meant more people on the phones, more traders at the screens, more balance sheet posted as collateral.

Software scales differently. The marginal cost of adding one more battery to the pool is close to zero. The model that prices one site prices ten thousand. The system that answers the grid operator in under a second does not slow down as the pool grows. It gets more accurate.

Banking went through this first. A bank used to need branches, a balance sheet and a century of trust. In 2015 two founders started Revolut as an app for spending money abroad. Eleven years later it has tens of millions of customers and a full UK banking licence. The incumbents had every advantage except software.

Energy is where banking was a decade ago. Automation gives ambitious builders a way into a sector the incumbents have held for a hundred years. Volton already runs more than 80 MW this way. The curve has barely started. Headcount is not the constraint. Judgement is.

The knowledge this takes already exists in pieces. A grid engineer knows how a reserve product is prequalified. A trader knows how imbalance settles when a forecast misses. An installer knows how a heat pump behaves when it is told to pause. Each of them has mastered one piece. Nobody has put the whole puzzle together. That is our job: combine the pieces and look at the result with fresh eyes. What no specialist can hand over is learned by doing it with money on the line.

We came to this without the industry’s priors. That was the advantage. An outsider asks why prices are annual, why margins are hidden, why a battery earns nothing most of the year. An insider knows the answer and has stopped asking.

Every rule we learn becomes code. Every forecast error becomes training data. Knowledge that compounds in software keeps compounding when nobody is in the room.

Every durable monopoly starts by owning a small market. Ours is the Baltic balancing market.

In February 2025 the Baltic states disconnected from the Russian grid and synchronised with continental Europe. Overnight, three countries had to buy their own balancing reserves through markets that had not existed the year before. No incumbent had a head start. The rules were new and so were the products. The advantage went to whoever could connect and prequalify flexible assets fastest.

We hold balancing and balance-responsibility licences in all three Baltic states and trade on Nord Pool. From that base the path is concentric: the Baltics, then the Nordics, then continental Europe. The problem there is the same and far bigger.

Europe’s energy transition runs on indefinite optimism: targets for 2030, 2040 and 2050, subsidies for hardware and committees for everything else. Nobody has a concrete plan for how millions of batteries, heat pumps and cars will actually coordinate.

We are definite about it. Every flexible device connected to software. Every device earning on every market it can reach. Its owner paid automatically and never asked to think about it. The reserve the grid needs is already built. It sits in garages, boiler rooms and basements.

The same three steps work for a water boiler and for a solar park. Only the size of the payout changes.

Vertical integration is unfashionable because it is hard. It is also the only way the pieces fit. A forecast is worthless if dispatch cannot act on it within the second. Dispatch is worthless if settlement cannot pay for it correctly. So we build the whole chain ourselves.

The prize goes to the last mover: the company that builds the layer nobody needs to build again.

Once a device is enrolled, integrated and prequalified, it stays. Every asset added improves the forecast for every other. Every market entered raises the value of every device already in the pool. The coordination layer of the grid will not stay fragmented. In each region it will consolidate into very few platforms. We intend to be the one in ours.

The sensible plan was to pick one thing. A slightly better supplier. A slightly faster trading desk. A slightly smarter device. Each is a fine business. None of them changes how the grid works.

We chose to take on all of it at once: the supply, the trading, the licences, the devices and the software that ties them together. It felt right. It was also the only version worth building. The problem only disappears when the whole chain changes. Nobody else was going to change it.

That choice has a cost. We trade under our own balance responsibility. When a forecast misses, the imbalance is ours to pay. When a market rule changes overnight, our revenue moves first.

An incumbent can survive a bad year. Its balance sheet absorbs the loss and its managers move on to the next job. We have one company. Everything we have is in it.

A company that can afford to fail usually does. We have everything to lose. That is why we will still be here decades from now.

Energy rewards patience. A solar park built this year will still be producing in the 2050s. A grid connection outlives the contract that paid for it. Most of the industry is priced by the quarter and built for decades.

Naval’s rule applies here: play long-term games with long-term people. Honest numbers compound into trust. Data compounds into better forecasts. Customers who stay compound into a track record only time can build.

Trust takes years to build and a day to lose. So we keep the margin visible and the terms simple. A customer who is free to leave and stays is worth more than one who is locked in.

We build for the life of the asset, not the length of the contract.

Everyone in energy now promises abundance. It is the right goal and usually the wrong plan. Abundance is not a quantity of panels. Europe already switches off solar parks on the sunniest afternoons of the year because nothing on the grid is ready to use the power. Incumbents curtail wind turbines for a worse reason. They would rather throw the power away than carry the imbalance risk of producing it.

In 1954 the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission promised electricity too cheap to meter. It never came. The plants were expensive. A grid run on annual prices also had no way to use cheap power when it arrived. The sun has since delivered the first half of that promise. The second half is coordination. Coordination is software.

The destination is a grid that allocates itself. Every flexible machine earning. Every owner paid. The price of a kilowatt-hour falling towards the cost of the hardware that produced it. Nobody resents their electricity supplier anymore. The price is visible, the bill is fair and there are no surprises.

This is capitalism with more owners. Balancing the grid used to be the job of a few large power stations. The money went to whoever owned them. Now millions of homes and businesses do the heavy lifting with their batteries, heat pumps and chargers. The money follows the work. It flows to the people who keep the grid in balance. The few who owned the plants no longer take all of it.

Utilities were built to ration scarcity. Volton is built to allocate abundance.