Lothar Stein: It Feels Good That ProCom Is Part of Volue

Earlier this year, Volue acquired the German energy company ProCom with the goal of expanding Volue’s European offering. We talk to Lothar Stein, General Manager of ProCom, about the synergies between the two companies and the road ahead.

Published

Jan 13, 2022

Lothar Stein

“It feels good to be part of Volue,” says Lothar Stein. “We had such a warm welcome with visits from our new colleagues, including Trond Straume, CEO of Volue.”

“When we first had a look at the customer segmentation and the product portfolio along the clean energy value chain, it felt good to see that ProCom brought added value to the portfolio.”

For Lothar Stein, who started his career as an Electrical Engineer for the Coca-Cola Company, the biggest advantage of joining forces with Volue is the very strong solution the two companies bring to the market.

“Our product portfolios are very much complementary. At ProCom, we are strong with regard to the optimisation of combined heat and power (CHP) assets. At the same time, Volue has built its competence in hydropower optimisation. Another new addition to Volue, Likron, brings in the best algo-trader on the market. When you put all this together, we have a really strong solution for the market along the entire energy value chain.”

ProCom has a strong heritage. Headquartered in Aachen, Germany and with offices in Cologne and Berlin, the company has been serving German energy customers for over 40 years.

With approximately 60 employees and three million Euros in annual recurring revenues, the family-owned business has provided leading technology solutions to the energy sector and adjacent industries.

“The current Volue energy optimisation portfolio is aimed at the big energy producers, while the ProCom products cover the small and medium-size segment. 90 per cent of our customers are in the DACH region and close to 80 per cent of these customers are in the small and medium-size customer segment.”

This is why ProCom is focusing its development effort on this segment and on the way to decentralise generation assets.

“There is a difference in how we serve the small and medium-size customers as opposed to those with big assets and hundreds of megawatts.”


Synergies in software development resources

Lothar Stein says that many of the opportunities will come through synergies with regard to the software development resources.

“We are in the process of developing a software platform, the infrastructure for the Software-as-a-Service solutions we want to deliver to the market. Volue has also come a long way in turning its offerings into SaaS solutions. There is a big opportunity in bringing our SaaS platform clusters together.”

The next steps in the development of the flagship BoFiT product will see its functionality grouped into single services that are migrated to the software platform and made available as a SaaS service.

From Lothar Stein’s point of view, in the future, there will be clusters along the energy value chain, like hydro and thermal optimisation, market channel optimisation, algo-trading, standard trading functionality, balancing markets, and more.

“We already started aligning our products for the balancing market.”


Focus on the heat transition

ProCom’s ambitious growth and expansion strategy lead through the heat transition.

“In Germany, by 2030 close to 50 per cent of the heat generation will be based on renewables. We will see heat pumps jump from one million today to six million in 2030. We will see hydrogen first in the heating sector. By 2030, my team wants to become the centre of excellence for sector coupling – this includes heat, power and transportation sectors. We need to have the solutions for how to get this combined and optimised.”

Like Volue, ProCom is committed to supporting its customers in the green transition.