Learn how Enpal is accelerating the green energy transition using MongoDB Atlas

Enpal is at the heart of the greatest challenge of the 21st century: fighting climate change. The German start-up has ambitious plans to build Europe’s largest energy movement.

“We want to tackle this global issue by putting solar panels on every roof, a battery into every home, and an electric vehicle with a charger in front of every door,” said Enpal Founder and CEO, Mario Kohle.

The Enpal difference, he continues, is that this movement is as much about people as it is about infrastructure. “We connect people to a renewable community.”

Enpal collects real-time data from more than 65,000 customers of its connected solar panels, heat pumps and EV chargers. It enables individual customers to check their energy metrics, and creates a national and international snapshot, forming a gigantic virtual power plant and enabling the energy transition. This mammoth data challenge is made possible by MongoDB Atlas, equipped with native time series collections.

Dramatic growth projections, said Chief Architect Nils Lappe, meant Enpal’s initial data plumbing and architecture had to evolve. The company currently has 80,000 solar panel arrays, 4,000+ heat pumps and thousands of electric vehicle (EV) chargers live across Germany. Broader European expansion may see these figures quickly multiply by a factor of ten.

MongoDB Time Series Collections enables Enpal to handle time-series data coming in from these devices and acts, as Lappe puts it, like a “hot storage” layer for this data.

Previously, this data was held in blob (Binary Large Object) storage. Enpal explored and tested InfluxDB, ScyllaDB, and TimescaleDB before choosing MongoDB Atlas for its ease of use, performance and flexibility, as well as its affordability. MongoDB's aggregation pipelines streamline data querying, and eliminates the complexities associated with managing and joining data across multiple tables. This is particularly beneficial for Enpal, as it processes 200+ data points. Also useful, with Enpal being a heavy Azure user, is that it can run across any cloud.

With the company deeply mindful of data protection, a number of Atlas’s features shine here, Lappe added. Specifically, MongoDB's sharding capability simplifies compliance by allowing Enpal to segregate and host data based on geographic location.

“Sharding in general is a pain, but it's very easy with MongoDB,” said Lappe. “And MongoDB is always very open to do design reviews, so if you have questions or if you are in doubt that your schema is fine, you can always hook them in, explain your use case, show the schema and they suggest practical improvements.”

Enpal’s migration to this new approach is ongoing. The Azure storage can only handle so many connections per second, a limit Enpal is about to hit with its current account. Once complete, the shift to time series collections is set to reduce data processing costs by almost 60%.

“We project that we can handle up to 100,000 devices with a single M30 cluster at something like €6,600 a year,” Lappe says. “At that price, that much data and performance is pretty hilarious! Again, the MongoDB consultancy was the best by quite a distance. In addition, any technical questions we fired across were met with great answers.”

The effective use of data is at the forefront of Enpal’s expansion plans. Accurate data will enable customers to monitor domestic energy consumption, and, with excess energy being sold to the national grid, revenue generation. Individual, local and national data sets will provide the evidence of the impressive impact of green energy, key to encouraging widespread adoption.

“We’re using Azure Event Hub for streaming; that offers a very convenient event capture option to persist raw and transformed data. We then stream our data to hot storage in MongoDB, where we can access it and serve customers through this hot storage. The data lake we can access on a less regular basis to serve archive data.”

For the climate, many challenges lie ahead. With the right partners on board, Lappe said, no challenge is insurmountable: “Growth is a great problem to have.”

Keeping the planet cool has never been hotter.

MARIO KOHLE, Founder & CEO, Enpal

NILS LAPPE, Chief Architect, Enpal