Metlen Buys Greek Software Firm Joule to Boost Renewables Business

Metlen Energy & Metals (LSE: MTLN), the UK-listed Greek industrial group spanning power generation, renewables, energy retail and metals, said in an RNS statement today that it has acquired Joule, a Greek energy-software company. Shares slipped in early trade.

MTLN traded at 48.72 this morning, down 1.22% from yesterday’s close of 49.32. That leaves the stock well above its 52-week low of 29.76 but off its 52-week high of 55.00.

The deal centres on Joule’s jHub platform, which handles remote monitoring, control and optimisation of renewable energy and storage portfolios. Its features include production forecasting, remote curtailment commands that reduce a plant’s output on request, and a digital customer portal for producers. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Metlen said it intends to retain the Joule team for product development, engineering and go-to-market work.

The technology slots directly into Metlen’s aggregator business, a unit that bundles many small renewable generators together to manage their output as one larger portfolio. That business already covers roughly 1,450 renewable units and about 3GW of installed capacity, with producer representation in Italy and Romania and planned expansion into Bulgaria. It has also recently added 378MW of storage capacity. Folding jHub’s optimisation tools into that platform extends Metlen’s existing forecasting and curtailment capabilities across a business it has been steadily scaling.

Coming without disclosed financial terms, this looks like a capability bolt-on rather than a scale-changing acquisition, consistent with the small intraday share-price move. For MTLN shareholders, the dip should not be read as a market verdict on the deal itself — a bolt-on of this size would not typically move the stock materially either way — but it does point to management continuing to build higher-margin digital services around its renewables and storage assets.