Operating energy assets
— and making them controllable

At full load the plant could produce 25 MWe, the electric boiler could draw up to 10 MWe and the battery could charge or discharge 10 MW. But the challenge was not in those numbers. It was in making four assets work with each other on one grid connection: exporting steam costs electrical output, the electric boiler and the battery compete for the same cable capacity, and the customer's steam demand determines when anything is possible. In practice a range of roughly 8 to 28 MWe was achieved: the electric boiler rarely reached full power, because steam demand was falling rather than growing. That is what makes an asset controllable — not its capacity, but its capacity to move. We developed the network to the adjacent industrial estate in 2016, built it in 2017 and commissioned it in 2018: steam out, transferred at the customer through steam-to-steam exchangers, condensate returning as hot water. The route runs via Essity's distribution building and on to Duynie. Essity and Magnera took delivery from 2018, Duynie from 2020. In 2023 an Alfen battery of 10 MW/20 MWh was added, from tender through to operation, and between 2022 and 2024 a Parat electric boiler of 10 MWe for export steam. Asset management here was contractually embedded: a strategic asset management plan (SAMP) as a deliverable under the maintenance agreement, with maturity assessments and audits, in a cycle sustained from 2016 to 2023. In 2024 we took it into our own hands, building the environment ourselves in Ultimo instead of relying on the maintenance contractor's system, which brought maintenance, procurement and long-term planning back under our own control. Several further developments ran along the same line but were never realised — CO2 capture (CCU), Thermopod heat storage, and charging hubs for electric trucks and zero-emission construction equipment. In 2025 we gained more running hours from the steam turbine's extraction point after an overhaul, in which I moved from fixed steam conditions to sliding pressure. The plant was not new to me: in 2011, at Essent, I prepared the SDE+ subsidy application for it, and four years later I bought it back from the same group — from the other side of the table. BECC BV was declared bankrupt on 24 March 2026. Eleven years of operation preceded that. The installation dated from 1999, reliable output declined year on year and maintenance costs rose. The flexible components turned out to be worth the most at that point — a lesson I take to every asset I assess now.

At the energy hub we used the existing connection with a battery and an electric boiler, and traded on day-ahead, FCR, aFRR and imbalance. I would rather build quick feasibility models and analyses than thick reports: does a battery or flexible demand pay off here, and on what assumptions. Flexible demand is often faster and cheaper than waiting for grid reinforcement — and it turns a connection into something you can steer instead of a bottleneck.

From Grassa we contributed to the BioTreatCenter at Villa Flora in Venlo: an attempt to set up an open innovation hub for biomass and residual streams with several companies, under a recruited external director. That initiative was not continued after a few years. The demonstration day was hosted by the Aarts family, dairy farmers, who provided the yard, the grass and the hospitality. We mixed the grass protein into minced meat and grilled burgers with it. The primary-school children who came to watch tasted them. That is not folklore: anyone who wants to get a new feedstock into the food chain has to let people taste what it becomes. Grassa has since grown into a serious business, with Lely on board as a partner since 2025, a pilot press since 2024 and a demonstration facility opening in 2026. Martijn is still a minor shareholder.

Part of the concept was MIMOSA, a second-generation multi-input multi-output biorefinery, which would also let the paper chain and the chemical industry connect to the energy chain. In this period we prepared the SDE+ subsidy application for the bio-energy plant — the same plant BECC BV would acquire from RWE four years later. When Wagener Group started in February 2012, this same project became its first assignment: three days a week of project leadership for Essent, now as a contractor rather than an employee. On 28 September 2012 we held a partner event in the plant's large biomass silo under the title "Ruiken aan Cuijk" — a pun that translates roughly as "getting a whiff of Cuijk" — with speakers from Olfascan and SGS on odour and odour policy. The wordplay had a point: the subject was manure, and whether you can take it seriously as a feedstock. Anyone who wants to connect an agricultural chain to an energy chain has to be willing to have that conversation on site.

In doing so we brought Infra Solutions in-house — chiefly the Amer network — staff included, and later the portfolio of 118 gas engines from Essent Energy Services, which came with a small trading team. These were transfers of people, not just of assets, and they gave the department a market side of its own. The department was called Exploitatie and numbered around 70 FTE: two operations team managers, one maintenance team manager, a team of asset and risk managers, and a maintenance organisation that was roughly half outsourced. Operations and maintenance were run separately, with asset management as a discipline alongside them. We worked to the Value Driven Maintenance method, together with Mainnovation, with Ultimo as the maintenance system, and built the control instruments ourselves: monthly performance models, Long Term Asset Planning and NPV models. For the first time, business cases could be compared across projects. RWE completed its acquisition of Essent at the end of 2009. The following year we merged the heat activities RWE already held in the Netherlands — originating from Obragas in Helmond — with Essent Warmte, which became part of ELES in early 2010. Networks, customers and the staff who ran them moved into a single organisation. Those networks were not in the best technical condition, and that was not where the value sat. It sat in the customer base: heat customers are tied to their network for the long term. We acquired them on that basis and immediately set aside funds to clear the maintenance backlog. It is the same judgement that comes up with almost every heat network changing hands today — look at the state of the steel and you either overpay or walk away; look at the connections and you see where the return is.

At EPZ in Geertruidenberg (May 1999 to December 2000) we introduced co-firing at the pulverised-coal units BS12 and Amer 8, using residual streams such as cocoa husks, sewage sludge, bentonite saturated with vegetable oil, and paper sludge. In January 2001 I moved to Essent Sustainable Energy as Manager Portfolio Control, and from July 2004 to Essent Energy Trading as Manager Sustainable Production & Development. There we built up the sourcing of green labels and certificates from producers of wind, solar, biomass co-firing, biogas and landfill gas — the cover behind Essent's Groene Stroom product, a brand name that later became a generic term across the whole market.