HOMER Grid alternatives for European C&I battery studies

What HOMER Grid does well

HOMER Grid (UL Solutions) designs grid-connected systems with PV, wind, batteries and EV charging to cut bills and peak demand. It finds the least-cost configuration, values demand-charge reduction, models ROI and battery life, and produces client-facing proposal reports; PV production can be imported from HelioScope or PVsyst (HOMER Grid). Standard Annual is $4,200 a year for one user, Standard Monthly $665 a month, Enterprise by quote, with a free trial (pricing).

For a North American portfolio, or a design that has to weigh wind and EV charging against each other, it is hard to replace, and this article does not try to argue otherwise.

Why European studies look elsewhere

The value of a battery behind the meter sits in the site's tariff, and European network tariffs are built differently from each other and from American demand charges:

• Netherlands: a large connection pays per contracted kW, per kW of the month's highest quarter-hour (kWmax) and per kWh; on Liander's 2026 medium-voltage tariff €2.29 and €3.57 per kW per month and €0.0226 per kWh (Liander 2026). The ACM's draft decision of 8 October 2026 would weight the kWmax by month and hour from 1 January 2028 (ACM draft).
• Germany: a load-metered site pays a Leistungspreis on the year's single highest 15-minute load, at one of two prices depending on whether it runs above or below 2,500 full-load hours. Every grid operator publishes its own sheet: RheinNetz's 2026 medium-voltage prices are €21.41 per kW a year below 2,500 hours and €103.84 at or above (RheinNetz 2026), NEW Netz's €16.80 and €118.34 (NEW Netz 2026).
• Romania: the regulated network tariffs have no kW charge at all (MET notice), so a battery earns on energy prices and solar, not on peaks.

A tool without these tariffs built in can still model them if you type them in, operator by operator and year by year. Whether that is acceptable depends on how many European studies you do. For the tariffs themselves, see Dutch large-connection tariffs and German grid charges and the 2,500-hour rule.

Who wrote this

Zorowatt wrote this article, and Zorowatt is one of the tools in it. The facts about the other tools come from their own public pages (and, where named, a press release or a trade magazine), read on 2026-10-28; we have not run the other tools ourselves. Where a page did not say something, this article says "not stated in the pages read", not "no". Nobody paid to be included and there are no affiliate links. If a vendor finds an error, write to [email protected] and we correct it with the date.

The alternatives at a glance

Sources: Furo and its press release; Gridcog and pricing; US DOE on REopt and REopt.jl; PV*SOL premium; Tibo; Energy Toolbase pricing.

Furo

Furo (formerly Lumera Energy, Munich) is the closest European tool to what HOMER Grid does behind the meter: upload a load profile with the site's address, enter the grid fees, and get the optimal size, the operating strategy, the revenue per use case (self-consumption, dynamic tariffs, peak shaving, atypical grid use) and customer-ready documents. Installers can store their own battery systems and see which comes closest to the optimum (pv magazine, 17 Feb 2026, Furo). Its press release reports more than 3,500 sites planned or optimised and about 100 paying customers (press release).

Pick it if your sites are in its four countries and you want the planner and the operator to be the same company. No published bill reconstruction or data-quality report was found in the sources read; that is not proof it has none, so ask.

Gridcog

Gridcog simulates energy projects across many sites, assets and markets, including market prices (Gridcog). It is priced by jurisdiction and active sites a month: Core covers 5 sites and 1 market, Plus 10 sites and 3 markets, Enterprise is custom (pricing). Pick it for portfolio and market work; for one behind-the-meter site at a time it is more tool than the job needs.

REopt

REopt is free, open source and the strongest optimiser in this list: it sizes and dispatches PV, storage, wind, CHP and more as an LP or MILP, through a web tool, an API or the REopt.jl package (REopt.jl, web tool). It is aimed at federal agencies, researchers and engineers (US DOE). Pick it if you want the optimisation itself and will prepare the European tariff and the data yourself. Its guidance for sites outside the US was seen only as a search snippet, so this article makes no claim about it.

PV*SOL premium

PV*SOL premium designs and simulates PV in 3D, with batteries, charging strategies, measured load profiles, several grid tariffs per consumer, a 20-year financial analysis and reports in 24 languages with the company logo (Valentin Software). Its product page does not mention peak shaving or Leistungspreis charges. Pick it when the PV array is the project and the battery is part of it.

Tibo

Tibo is a Dutch company selling an energy management system, with a simulator that runs on the previous year's real data and a free quick check of the grid connection; installers and energy advisors can resell the system and run simulations (Tibo). Its price is not published. Pick it if the client wants the battery operated as well as planned; the sizing comes from the company that will run the system.

Zorowatt

Zorowatt is a browser tool for one business site at a time. It reads the meter export (CSV, Excel, MSCONS or Green Button), flags gaps, duplicates, daylight-saving errors and kW / kWh mix-ups, rebuilds the bill month by month under a versioned tariff and checks it line by line against the invoices, then sizes the battery with a rule-based controller and shows the optimal (LP) dispatch as the upper bound. It has a peak mode and a connection-limit mode, planned solar from PVGIS, NPV, IRR and payback with degradation, and a PDF report with the data-quality appendix and every tariff source.

What it does not do, compared with HOMER Grid: no wind, no North American tariffs, no customer API, no live battery control or trading, and the Workspace and report are in English only.

Moving a study from HOMER Grid

1. Start from the meter data, not the project file: Zorowatt does not import HOMER files. Check the export with the free meter data checker.
2. Collect the invoices for the same 12 months, so the rebuilt bill can be checked against them.
3. Pick the site's operator tariff, or enter the rates in the generic template if the country is not covered.
4. Size the battery in peak mode, or in connection-limit mode if the site cannot grow its connection, and compare the result with the HOMER Grid study side by side.

Many teams will keep both: HOMER Grid for system design across technologies, a European tool for the bill the client actually pays.

Questions to ask any alternative

• Which countries' tariffs are built in, from which operators, for which year, and with which source?
• Does it rebuild last year's bill from the meter data, and show the difference from the invoices?
• What does it do with gaps, daylight-saving days and kW / kWh mix-ups in the data?
• Is the dispatch something a real controller can do, or perfect foresight?
• Is the tool tied to a hardware or operating contract?
• What does it cost for the number of studies you do a month, before a demo call?

Sources

• HOMER Grid and pricing
• Furo, Furo press release, pv magazine, 17 Feb 2026
• Gridcog and pricing
• US DOE on REopt, REopt.jl, REopt web tool
• PV*SOL premium
• Tibo
• Energy Toolbase pricing
• Liander 2026, ACM draft decision, 8 Oct 2026, RheinNetz 2026, NEW Netz 2026, MET Romania 2026

Last checked: 2026-10-30. Facts about other tools were read on 2026-10-28 from the pages linked next to them; prices and features change, so check the vendor's page before you rely on one. Examples marked illustrative are not real customers.