Withthegrid: On-site control and infrastructure monitoring for European energy assets

Overview

Withthegrid began in Utrecht in 2016 with wireless sensors that measure the cathodic protection voltage on steel gas pipes, which Stedin piloted in 2018. That work grew into the Asset Monitoring Platform (AMP), IoT software for network operators: sensors on gas pipelines, heat networks, water networks and substations report into it, and it turns the readings into maps, alerts and work orders.

The Teleport Gateway came later and is now the larger business. It is a small controller installed at a solar park, wind turbine, battery or charging site: it reads the equipment over Modbus, runs control strategies that keep the site inside its grid connection, and gives traders, aggregators, grid operators and the owner's own systems one API for monitoring and control.

The Teleport is deliberately neutral. It does not trade or optimise against prices; its documentation leaves market-facing dispatch to the trader or platform connected to it. What it adds is the layer underneath those platforms: a library of asset drivers with a setup page per brand, grid limits enforced on site even when the cloud link drops, and certified interfaces for grid operators, starting with the Dutch Realtime Interface. Move Energy, which led the company's 2025 funding round, describes it as a translator that lets EMS providers spend their effort on optimisation rather than integration. That makes Withthegrid a component supplier more than a platform: most of its Teleport customers reach the market through a partner's software.

Offering

Teleport Gateway

The Teleport connects solar inverters and loggers, wind turbines, batteries, EV chargers, generators, meters and relays to the systems that need to see or steer them. Control strategies run on the device itself (full list): static power limitation, power and current limiters, battery power and current limiters with a cascade variant, an EV power limiter and charging power distributor, a multi-asset power limiter for hybrid sites, battery peak shaving, peak shaving for self-consumption, power reservation limiters and a generator battery charger. For market and grid services it carries aFRR, FCR and mFRR dispatch from the connected trader, and the Dutch congestion products: capacity limiting contracts, GOPACS, Blokstroom and Enexis Zonbalans. The documentation is candid that a controller has to measure a violation before it can correct it, and recommends setting limits 10 to 20 percent below the physical limit.

It is sold as hardware, connectivity and a subscription, with the structure published but not the prices. Sites under 1 MWp pay a three-year all-inclusive capital price; larger sites combine capital and operating charges; a paid proof of concept is available. It is designed for commercial and industrial assets from 50 kW and for portfolios from one site to 1 GW, and is not intended for homes. Sites that cannot lose control can take a redundant rack-mount unit with two Teleport controllers and automatic failover. Units ship preconfigured within one to two business days and are installed by the customer, their installer or a Withthegrid partner, with Withthegrid configuring the device remotely during the site acceptance test (FAQ).

Grid-operator interfaces

The same device acts as the customer endpoint for the grid operator's remote-control requirement in four countries: the Realtime Interface for Dutch feed-in connections of 1 to 50 MW, Fluvius Telecontrole V4 and V5 in Flanders, HEDNO remote monitoring and control in Greece for installations above 400 kW, and the Danish DSO interface for new plants above 125 kW. The Dutch, Greek and Danish rules all derive from the EU Requirements for Generators (Regulation 2016/631), and the Flemish and Greek interfaces use IEC 60870-5-104, as Danish ones often do, so one product covers several markets without new hardware.

Teleport inside

Equipment makers can ship the Teleport inside their own product. The OEM programme sells it as a route to grid-code and cybersecurity compliance (NIS2, RED 3.3, VDE 4110 and 4120) and to trader integrations, with Withthegrid maintaining firmware.

Asset Monitoring Platform

AMP has two halves. The connectivity environment is where devices are defined, authenticated, parsed, sent commands and firmware updates, and handed to end customers with claim tokens. The monitoring environment shows assets on a GIS map, detects anomalies against thresholds, raises and assigns issues, and builds dashboards and reports. It is sold as SaaS on its own or through AMP managed solutions: preconfigured sensors (Withthegrid's own or third-party), SIM cards and data plans, the platform, firmware updates and support for one all-inclusive price per device per month. The packaged use cases are cathodic protection on pipelines, leak detection in district heating, SF6 and cable-oil leak detection in switchgear and transformers, and power-quality monitoring of MV/LV transformers. For cathodic protection Withthegrid makes its own devices for test poles and rectifiers.

Technology

Hardware

The Teleport is an aluminium unit of 112 by 84 by 25 mm weighing 450 g, with an LTE Cat 1 modem, two 100 Mbps Ethernet ports and up to three RS-485 ports, two of them galvanically isolated. It runs from 8 to 36 V DC and draws 2.6 to 7.2 W, operates from minus 40 to 80 °C, and carries a stated MTTF above 200,000 hours and a 24-month warranty. It mounts on a wall, a DIN rail or in an IP65 enclosure, and a 19-inch 3U redundant unit holds two Teleports, two DC supplies and a failover relay for battery storage and other sites that cannot lose control (specifications). Every Teleport has its own LTE connection, which the FAQ recommends keeping as a fallback behind a local internet connection on large sites; the device accepts no inbound connections.

Connecting assets

Assets connect over Modbus TCP, with no practical limit on count, or Modbus RTU on RS-485, with up to three clusters. The asset library has a page per brand with setup instructions, covering names such as SMA, Huawei, SolarEdge, Sungrow, Fronius, Vestas, Enercon, Tesla, Fluence, Alfen, Kempower, Janitza, Carlo Gavazzi, Schneider Electric and Siemens, plus an OCPP entry for chargers. Withthegrid adds unlisted assets at no charge, and the monthly report lists what was added: in August 2026, for example, a Suzlon S88 power plant controller, LONGi and Risen battery systems, EMU Professional II meters and Metcom BlueBox line-voltage measurements.

APIs and data forwarding

The Teleport Cloud API is REST with JSON bodies, bearer tokens, versioned URLs and IETF RateLimit headers. Commands are scheduled with a start and end time, and a Teleport that loses its cloud connection falls back to a configured setpoint for each asset. Data forwarding pushes readings and commands to Amazon SNS, AMQP 0-9-1, Azure Service Bus, Grafana Loki, HTTPS, InfluxDB, Kafka, MQTT, MSSQL, MySQL or Postgres, at a default interval of 300 seconds with 1-second "flash" messages for fast services. Delivery is at least once; a Teleport that loses its link buffers up to 100 MiB locally, thinning older data so the buffer spans up to 204 days. On site, an optional Modbus TCP server (off by default) exposes readings and writable limits to a local SCADA or EMS, with a 60-second heartbeat after which local limits are dropped. Named integrations include Powernaut, Meter Insight, ACCURE and SynaptiQ, and the Teleport is certified to connect remote-control equipment to the Emsys VPP.

How data reaches AMP

External systems send data to AMP over HTTPS, with a token in the query string or an x-wtg-token header, or over CoAP with DTLS on port 5684; devices can also authenticate with X.509 client certificates or pre-shared keys (device access, webhook reference). A TypeScript identifier function maps each request to a device, and a TypeScript event handler per device type parses the payload into measurements. Bulk history arrives by Excel import, data leaves by CSV export or the API, and HTTPS forwarding supports static headers, OAuth2 client credentials, AWS Signature V4 and Azure SAS.

Security and certification

Withthegrid states ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certification and NIS2 and RED 3.3 compliance, without naming the certification body. The Teleport opens outbound connections only, authenticates with a per-device certificate, and receives firmware and security patches remotely; cloud platforms are hosted in the EU, data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and access is role-based. Monthly reports publish uptime and incidents: 99% for August 2026, after four minutes of elevated API errors on 28 August.

The Realtime Interface work is independently documented. Enexis describes a pilot from May 2023 at Raamsdonksveer and later Veldhoven with its SCADA supplier PSI, Withthegrid's Teleport and the customer Groendus, guided by DNV, and records that Withthegrid passed conformance and lab tests as one of two parties then compliant with the Netbeheer Nederland specification. Withthegrid dates its certification as the first RTI customer endpoint to April 2024, and presented the IEC 61850 implementation, built on a third-party library, at CIRED 2025.

Customers

Renewable and battery control

Novar, a Dutch renewable energy developer, chose the Teleport to standardise monitoring and control across a 650 MW portfolio of rooftop and ground-mounted sites with mixed inverter brands. In May 2025, 150 MW was live, 350 MW was being brought into operation and the rest was planned. Novar cites curtailment that holds the last or predefined limit through network outages.

SemperPower, now part of Return, runs Castor, a 30.7 MW, 62.6 MWh battery at Vlissingen-Oost that was the largest in the Netherlands when it was energised in November 2023. The Teleport sits between the battery EMS and the offtakers' systems, with several Teleports per location for redundancy.

The energy supplier NieuweStroom pairs its capacity limiting contracts with the Teleport so solar producers are paid to curtail during congestion; Solar & Storage Magazine reported 1,000 installations planned for 2025. Battery maker Intercel made its Cellpower systems integrate directly with the Teleport in March 2025. pv magazine reported Eneco, Essent and Vattenfall among its users. The Teleport page adds Vandebron, Edmij (balancing services to TenneT from batteries, solar and wind), OM | Nieuwe Energie's solar cooperatives, Skoon's mobile batteries, ELIX, the Johan Cruijff ArenA's second large battery and the Port of Amsterdam energy hub, where the Teleport reads every meter so the companies on it can share grid capacity.

Infrastructure monitoring

Stedin's 2018 pilot put 20 sensors on its gas network, where fitters had measured cathodic protection by hand once a year at 10,000 points. In 2019 Westland Infra became the first grid operator to equip a complete gas network. The largest reference is Gasunie: 11,000 of its 18,000 cathodic protection test poles on 12,000 km of pipeline now report to AMP, replacing periodic contractor visits. The sensors report every 361 minutes, so that over a year every hour of the day is sampled without draining the battery. AMP's product page also names Dunea, Waterbedrijf Groningen, Enexis, Eneco and Shell, and the cathodic protection page quotes engineers at Stedin, Shell's NAM pipelines team and the contractor Hommema.

Markets

The Netherlands is the home market and where almost every public reference sits. The grid-compliance products define the next ring: Flanders through Fluvius, Greece through HEDNO, and Denmark. In March 2025 the chief executive told pv magazine the company was expanding into Belgium and Greece. The footprint figures differ by source: Move Energy cited six countries in September 2025, and Withthegrid's company page now says it has deployed in eight EU countries.

Teleport buyers are asset owners and independent power producers, energy traders and aggregators, installers and equipment makers. Much of the business goes through partners: the partner directory lists about twenty companies that work with the Teleport, including suppliers and traders (NieuweStroom, Edmij, Eddy Grid, Yuso, Friday Energy), EMS providers (Kenter Groendus, Tibo.energy, Powernaut, BEE), EPC and installation firms (Generation Green, Steddion, Brenergie) and advisers (Stroomkr8, Gridstate). Withthegrid says partners are listed on active working relationships and verified deployments, and that it earns no referral fees.

AMP buyers are network operators and utilities: gas transmission and distribution operators, water companies and heat network operators, with the managed solutions aimed at teams that want sensors, connectivity and software from one supplier.

Company

History and ownership

The legal entity is methetnet B.V. (Dutch for "with the grid"), registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under 66591880 in August 2016 according to its LEI record. Withthegrid itself dates its founding to 2017, when Paul Mignot, Rob Everhardt and two co-founders set it up after winning the Intel Hackathon in Amsterdam. It operates from the Dotslash campus at Europalaan 400 in Utrecht and is privately held.

Leadership

Paul Mignot is co-founder and chief executive, Rob Everhardt co-founder and chief technology officer, and Anouk de Laat chief operating officer. The advisory board has Sophie Dingenen, an energy lawyer and partner at Bird & Bird; René Raaijmakers, who built and led Groendus; and Jeffrey Williams, a senior investment manager at ROM Utrecht Region (company page).

Funding

Two disclosed rounds total €4.5 million, listed below. ROM Utrecht Region, the regional development fund, records its stake from September 2021. The 2025 round, led by the Amsterdam fund Move Energy, pays for international expansion, product development, a larger asset library and operations. No revenue or profit figures are published.

People

The company page says the team is more than 50 people; LinkedIn listed 58 employees in September 2026.