Vandebron Powers Analytics and Supports the Green Energy Transition

Since it was founded in 2013, Vandebron has always had a clear mission: Connect customers in the Netherlands with green energy producers — and help the country move to 100% green energy as soon as possible.

Through the company’s growth and acquisition by E.ON subsidiary Essent, its green ambitions have remained constant.

What has changed, however, is the way Vandebron approaches data. With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, Vandebron mitigates risk, empowers technical and non-technical teams, and continues to support its energy transition.

Data is a constant catalyst for success across Vandebron — from energy and EV charging to energy management and flexibility services. “Data is the most important ingredient for all the businesses we run within Vandebron,” says Tim Faber, Vandebron’s Manager of Data and Analytics. “We use a range of complex data products to forecast energy production and consumption. That’s how we forecast the best available price for customers and help business units make the right decisions. But it’s a costly and crucial operation.”

This operation was ill-served by Vandebron’s legacy data warehouse solution. Dispersed, siloed systems meant the data teams at Vandebron were shuffling data back and forth between data platforms and the company’s CRM, creating performance bottlenecks and duplicated records.

“We lacked that single source of truth we needed,” Faber says. “And the old system was inefficient — to the point where it was taking us up to nine hours to compute some of our financial tables.”

To build a new bedrock for data success at Vandebron, Faber and his team began sketching out what their ideal data platform would look like — an exercise that paved the way in one clear direction.

Between Vandebron’s data platform wish lists and its existing data sets, few platforms could deliver everything the energy provider needed. “We wanted a big performance jump, improved data controls, tools to improve our data hygiene and low overheads and maintenance requirements,” Faber says. Any solution the team selected also needed to be optimized for the kinds of structured data Vandebron deals with, in addition to offering expansive capacity limits. After running proof-of-concept (PoC) projects across several platforms, Vandebron’s choice became clear. 

Most importantly, Snowflake’s extensive multi-cloud support makes it easy for a company like Vandebron to share data with its associated brands. “We use Snowflake to share data across our entire ecosystem,” Faber says. “I don’t have to worry if Essent teams, for example, are using a different cloud provider than us. Everything is unified within Snowflake.”

Since deploying Snowflake, Vandebron has extended the platform to teams across the entire business — from customer agents and data analysts all the way to its leadership teams.

Now, more than 140 Vandebron employees use the platform to generate reports, analyze energy production and consumption data, and deliver dashboards to internal teams and customers.

Its new system is so easy to use that even Vandebron’s non-technical teams can self-serve. “We’ve almost accidentally created a data mesh situation,” says Faber. “Our analysts work in Snowflake directly, but other teams can interface with the platform through worksheets to manage the data and build the reports they need.”

These changes are just the start of Faber’s plans for the platform. “We’ve been looking into how we can run apps in Streamlit so non-technical colleagues get an easy-to-use UI layer. That way, they can fill in requests to trigger new data models to be built and updated in Snowflake without interacting with the data directly.”

The team is also integrating Snowflake with other tools Vandebron uses, such as dbt. At the same time, Vandebron is exploring how it can combine machine learning model outputs with Snowflake as a source to support teams with the data they need to improve team performance and financial decision-making.

Much like the rest of Vandebron’s business, the way it uses Snowflake is rapidly growing and changing. But for all these exciting developments, the mission for Vandebron — and the role Faber’s team plays in it — hasn’t changed. 

“The energy market is a zero-sum game,” Faber says. “Everyone needs energy, so the market can be price-sensitive. To get everyone on board with green energy, we need to make it more appealing, and part of that is making it cost-effective. Data is vital in helping us achieve this. And Snowflake is vital in getting data to the right people to make that happen.”