Kraken, an operating system for energy, now manages more power than Europe’s largest fossil-fuel plant with what marks a turning point in how modern energy systems are run. Featuring over 5.7GW of real-time, dispatchable clean power, Kraken has surpassed the scale of Poland’s Bełchatów Power Station – Europe’s largest and most polluting coal plant.
Kraken’s virtual power plant combines 3.2GW of dispatchable generation and grid-scale battery storage, with 2.5GW of residential flexibility. This includes electric vehicles and heat pumps. Together, the assets operate as a single coordinated system, delivering power where it is most needed and reducing overall reliance on fossil fuels.
Devrim Celal, Chief Flexibility and Marketing Officer at Kraken, said: “Surpassing the capacity of Europe’s largest coal plant shows that virtual power plants are no longer niche technology. They are rapidly becoming a backbone of tomorrow’s grid. Kraken gives utilities and asset owners real-time control over clean power, turning intermittent renewables into reliable, dispatchable energy and accelerating the move beyond coal.”
The grids constructed today are designed to meet infrequent peaks in demand and remain under-utilised for much of the day. In order to serve these short-lived peaks, global investment in transmission infrastructure is expected to exceed $200 billion by 2030. European electrical networks are particularly under-utilised. Low-voltage networks, the final stage of the grid connecting to homes, typically operate at just 2 to 21 percent of utilisation.
Kraken raises a challenge to this inefficiency by providing flexibility. By shifting when energy is produced and consumed, Kraken technology flattens peak demand, spreads energy usage more evenly across the day, and enables far greater use of existing infrastructure. The result? Lower costs, reduced need for expensive grid upgrades, and an accelerated push on decarbonisation.
Their technology monitors both grids and markets in real time, coordinating when grid-scale batteries and flexible generation store and dispatch energy, whilst shifting the consumption of hundreds of thousands of consumer devices, such as EVs and heat pumps, to periods where power is clean, cheap, and abundant. This cuts bills for consumers, reduces reliance on fossil fuels, and strengthens grid reliability against outages.
As energy systems transition away from a handful of centralised fossil-fuel mega plants, Kraken is orchestrating hundreds of thousands of distributed clean energy resources to deliver capacity without smokestacks and power without concrete. This new milestone signifies the end of fossil-fuel dominance. Not through more steal in the ground, but through consumer participation, software, and the flexibility of millions of devices working in sync to deliver a more modern, abundant, and resilient energy system.
Proper integration between consumer flows and energy production is necessary to increase overall efficiency. Kraken is showing a direct path towards how we can use less to make more, and offering a sustainable path to do so as well.
