Daniela Haldy-Sellmann, Volue’s General Manager for Technical Operations, reflects on her first months in the role, the forces reshaping Europe’s distribution grid, and what Volue is building in response.
In January I stepped into the role of General Manager for Distribution and Asset Operations at Volue, and said yes before I fully knew what I was saying yes to. The first thing I did was listen: to customers, to colleagues, and to the market.
The energy transition is not a technology problem: it is an execution and regulation problem. Some 1,700 GW of renewable projects are stuck in connection queues across Europe, and the bottleneck is not ambition but delivery.
Beyond that, four ideas keep coming back to me. First, speed comes from people and trust, not plans. Second, while Europe deliberates, capital decides. Third, our grid is one system but our rules are not. And fourth, customers don't buy solutions, they buy outcomes.
The scale of the DSO challenge is visible in the numbers: in 2024 alone, more than 450,000 new RES connection requests were filed across 12 member states — a 133% increase since 2021 — and annual investment in distribution grids must double to as much as €67 billion to keep pace. These pressures are pan-European; no market is exempt.
The regulatory response is accelerating. The European Grids Package, launched in December 2025, is a priority legislative file for 2026. But legislation moves slower than operational reality. DSOs across the EU are already navigating tightening TSO-DSO coordination requirements, with each member state interpreting shared network codes differently. Germany has moved furthest: §14a EnWG requires real-time management of controllable loads, and Redispatch 2.0 demands automated, auditable congestion management between network operators. Other markets are following the same logic. Beneath it all sits a shared problem: most DSOs still lack real-time visibility of where congestion is forming — and the tools to act on it before it becomes a crisis.
Volue Network Information & Operations (NIO) brings together decades of proven Nordic DSO expertise — NETBAS, Volue FASIT, and Volue ADMS — into a single managed cloud platform covering the full grid lifecycle: documentation, network calculation, investment planning, maintenance, fault management, real-time operations, and regulatory reporting. This has been a working priority for the team since the end of last year, and we are proud to have released the first version. This is a milestone that reflects months of focused delivery work.
The most significant shift NIO represents is not functional but operational. Volue now takes full responsibility for running the platform; new capabilities reach customers automatically, with no upgrade projects or consultancy engagements.
Managing wind parks, batteries, and distributed assets around the clock — across day-ahead, intraday, and reserve markets — is not the core business of most asset owners. Our Asset Operations offering provides four managed service lines: 24/7 PowerOps-as-a-service for remote monitoring and control; Market Communication-as-a-service for scheduling, settlement, and regulatory reporting; Trading-as-a-service for trade execution and post-trade settlement; and Optimisation-as-a-service for continuous portfolio optimisation across all market windows.
We are also actively renewing the underlying SCADA technology, an investment that will deliver greater performance and the foundation for enhanced service offerings. What makes this combination rare is its breadth: most European vendors focus either on grid management software or on asset operations and trading services - very few do both, and fewer still connect those layers through a dedicated time-series data platform. That is the stack Volue is building.
HAKOM’s PowerTSM platform sits at the centre of the data value chain, ingesting from SCADA systems, smart meters, sensors, and market interfaces, then harmonising, validating, and preparing data for applications from energy trading to group reporting. Customers save up to 80% of the time previously spent on data processing. With PowerTSM now integrated into the Volue portfolio, DSOs using NIO and Asset Operations customers can connect their operational data to the same platform, turning the time series data layer into a shared foundation across the portfolio rather than a repeated integration problem.
Our customers are not short of vision. They are short of time, capacity, and tools that meet them where they are. The SCADA programme is underway. NIO is moving NETBAS customers into a new operational model. Asset Operations is expanding its managed service reach. And PowerTSM is connecting the data layer across the portfolio in ways that create genuinely new value.
Progress rarely comes from one big leap. It comes from the smaller improvements that compound over time. We have made a strong start. The commitment now is to keep earning momentum by delivering what we promise, learning quickly, and staying close to the realities our customers face every day.