What grew out of NEON

NEON was the first step for Zenmo to develop LUX-NL.

LUX-NL is Zenmo's simulation of the Dutch electricity system, built from the bottom up. It starts with individual buildings and the people and companies in them, and with their devices: solar panels, electric cars, heat pumps and batteries. It places them behind the transformer that serves them, and adds up what they do to the low-, medium- and high-voltage grid. Because it steps through the year in quarters of an hour, it shows where and when the grid becomes congested, and what flexible devices can do about it.

From NEON to LUX-NL

When NEON started in 2020, it named three barriers to a fast energy transition. The third was that transition science lacked quantified models that give policy makers actionable intelligence. NEON's answer was an integral model: agent-based, tied to real locations, and fed by the technical and social research of the other work packages (work package 10, Integral models).

Building that model inside NEON turned out to be harder than planned. Researchers tended to build their own separate models, and the most useful model needed a higher level of technical maturity than a PhD project is meant to deliver. The agent-based design that Zenmo had drawn up before NEON started did hold up.

Zenmo therefore took the integral model further outside the PhD projects. First came the Holon project, which applied agent-based models to real energy hubs and residential areas (see Holon). LUX-NL is the next step. It combines the national future scenarios of the Dutch grid operators with the dynamic, bottom-up control of devices developed in Holon, and shows the result on a map of the Netherlands. NEON PhD alumni now work on LUX-NL at Zenmo.

What LUX-NL does

• It starts from measured, open data. Buildings come from the national building register (BAG), neighbourhood characteristics from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), and the grid from what grid operators publish. The future is a scenario laid over that measured present, and LUX-NL labels it as such.
• It compares ways to steer flexibility. The same households and devices run under a fixed tariff, a dynamic energy price, a capacity tariff, a time-of-use grid tariff, and a local congestion incentive.
• It shows behaviour that no one programmed in. Under dynamic prices, every smart device chases the same cheap hour, and that rush can push a transformer far above its rating. A capacity tariff flattens that peak; only coordination between devices keeps it under a fixed limit.

Where NEON research shows up

NEON work package	What LUX-NL takes from it
Integral models (wp10)	The agent-based, location-based design, and the lesson that a policy tool needs more maturity than a PhD model
Demand, storage and markets (wp03)	Batteries, demand response and price incentives as the core of flexibility
DC electricity grids (wp02)	The finding that there are many ways to connect new demand to the grid more smartly, each a way to ease congestion
Electric cars and trucks (wp04), Medium voltage fast charging (wp05)	Smart charging and vehicle-to-grid as major sources of flexibility
The human factor (wp07)	People's willingness to share and shift charging, which decides how much flexibility is real

Status

LUX-NL is under active development at Zenmo and has no public release yet (November 2026). The model results quoted on this page come from that development version and have not been validated against measured grid data. Zenmo's work in the ISIE project builds on the same modelling line.

Holon applies the integral, agent-based modelling of NEON to a question many Dutch regions now face: how can local flexibility help a congested electricity grid? The project produced open simulation tools for energy hubs and residential areas, and a national study that works out what a grid organised in nested local layers, called holons, could do for the Netherlands.

From NEON to Holon

NEON planned an integral model that would bring the results of all work packages together. Inside the programme that proved harder than expected: the most useful model needed a higher level of maturity than PhD projects deliver. To move the integral model forward, Zenmo carried out the Holon project alongside NEON. It made it possible to build agent-based integral models at a higher level of maturity, and to apply them to real energy hubs and neighbourhoods. Those models now flow back into the integral model that NEON set out to build, and into LUX-NL.

At the end of 2021 a consortium with experts from Witteveen+Bos, Quintel Intelligence and Zenmo took on a joint assignment from the Dutch government, including the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO): develop and validate a tool with which users can assess holarchic configurations of the energy system and test mechanisms to steer them. Work started in January 2022. Zenmo led the project; DRIFT (Erasmus University Rotterdam) contributed the social science. The tools are online at holons.energy, and the model code is open source under the MIT licence on GitHub.

NEON researchers helped shape Holon. Five NEON principal investigators are listed as Holon experts: Floor Alkemade and Rudi Bekkers (Eindhoven University of Technology), Derk Loorbach (DRIFT), Reint Jan Renes (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and Saskia Lavrijssen (Tilburg University).

What a holon is

A holon is a unit that manages its own energy flows as far as it can, and exchanges energy with the layer above only when it needs to. A building with solar panels, a battery and an electric car can be a holon. Buildings cluster into a neighbourhood, which is a larger holon; neighbourhoods cluster into a region. The result is a layered system, similar to the way the internet routes traffic without one central controller.

For the grid, the idea leads to two practical proposals. Flexible devices such as electric cars, heat pumps and batteries should receive a congestion signal that varies with time and place, active only where and when the grid is actually congested. And energy communities and business parks should get the room to reduce congestion locally themselves.

The national study

In September 2026 Zenmo published the study Holons - lokale flex als oplossing voor netcongestie (Holons: local flexibility as a solution for grid congestion). It divides the Netherlands into six archetypal areas, simulates the steering of electric cars, heat pumps, batteries and solar panels in each, and compares three scenarios: no flexibility (NoFlex), flexibility optimised by each household or company for itself (MyFlex), and flexibility coordinated through holons (HolonFlex). The adoption of new technology follows the national scenario that the Dutch grid operators use for most of their forecasts.

Where NEON research shows up

NEON work package	What Holon takes from it
Integral models (wp10)	The agent-based, location-based modelling approach
Demand, storage and markets (wp03)	Flexibility from batteries and demand, steered by price and congestion signals
Regulation (wp08a)	The question which rules and tariffs allow local steering
The human factor (wp07)	Acceptance of steering by households, such as shared and smart charging

Status

The Holon tools are online and open source; the web application was still being updated in October 2026. The national study is part of an ongoing public discussion about grid congestion in the Netherlands.

ISIE stands for Instrumentarium en Standaarden voor Integrale Energiesysteem-analyse: instruments and standards for integrated energy system analysis. It is a project commissioned by the Dutch government, with the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), that started in January 2026 and runs until mid-2027. A consortium led by Common Futures, with Zenmo, Eindhoven University of Technology, CE Delft, Open Energy Transition and Resourcefully, develops standards and shared tools for modelling local flexibility and local grids. More at isie.energy.

The problem ISIE addresses

Policy makers in the Netherlands work with many energy models that give different answers to the same question. Part of that difference is real uncertainty about the future. Another part comes from models that use different units, assumptions and scenarios, and from models used for questions they were not built for. Top-down national models also tend to miss what flexible devices in homes and businesses can do, while the bottom-up models that do capture it are not yet trusted.

ISIE does not build one model to replace the others. It makes existing models work together:

• Standards. Shared input scenarios and interfaces that describe flexibility, grid infrastructure and technological development in the same way, across grid levels and energy carriers. ISIE builds on existing standards where they exist.
• Instruments. The standard scenarios run on several models that each partner brings: Zenmo's LUX energy twin, CE Delft's CEnergie, TU/e's DOTS-Energy, Resourcefully's FLEX+, and PyPSA-NL from Open Energy Transition. ISIE compares their results, removes the differences that come from inconsistent assumptions and explains the rest. Local results are then combined into a national electricity grid model, with feedback from the national level back to the local one. Other modellers can join.
• Advice. With the standards and instruments in place, ISIE quantifies how much local flexibility can save, and which legal and regulatory steps that would require.

From NEON to ISIE

NEON named the lack of quantified transition models that give policy makers actionable intelligence as one of three barriers to a fast transition. Its own attempt at one integral model taught a lesson that shaped ISIE: researchers and organisations tend to build separate models, and those models will not go away. ISIE turns that lesson into a method. Instead of one model, it provides the standards that let many models answer a policy question together, and explain why they differ.

Two NEON partners, Eindhoven University of Technology and Zenmo, are part of the ISIE consortium. The agent-based modelling that Zenmo developed in NEON and in Holon is one of the bottom-up building blocks that ISIE links to other models.

Where NEON research shows up

NEON work package	What ISIE takes from it
Integral models (wp10)	The aim of integral, location-based scenarios that policy makers can use
Demand, storage and markets (wp03)	Flexibility of households and businesses as a resource for the grid
Standardization (wp08b)	The role of standards and interoperability in letting systems work together

Status

ISIE started in January 2026 and runs until mid-2027. As of November 2026 the consortium works in six-week sprints with sounding-board groups of policy makers, grid operators and knowledge institutes. The plan of approach and a memo on international standards are published on isie.energy.