Next Kraftwerke, Cologne: The nominated project is the Next Pool virtual power plant. More than 2,500 decentralized electricity producers and consumers with a total output of around 1,500 MW are bundled there. Nextpool includes a fully automated control system that reads the data from all the plants networked via M2M communication and controls them centrally. This creates a swarm of small power plants that take on the role of large power plants and thus make a decisive contribution to the energy transition. Via Next Pool, these small power plants can operate on the balancing energy market, which they would not be able to do as individual power plants due to the regulatory minimum entry size of five MW.