智和创：一家山东软件企业的能碳账本，怎么把绿电消费做成生意Zhihéchuàng: An Energy and Carbon Ledger of a Shandong Software Company, How to Turn Green Electricity Consumption into a Business

Zhuo Qiyan

In a commercial apartment building in Shizhong District, Jinan City, the team of Shandong Zhihechuang Information Technology Co., Ltd. has long been doing the same thing: helping industrial enterprises combine two sets of accounts for "electricity" and "carbon" into one. Founded in 2011, this software company has focused on full-chain green microgrid energy and carbon closed-loop management for the industrial sector for 14 years. As a national high-tech enterprise, a specialized and innovative enterprise in Shandong Province, and a gazelle enterprise in Shandong Province—under these several titles—its flagship product, the "Clean Energy AI Energy and Carbon Management System," achieved a 12.77% share of the domestic market in 2025, ranking it among the industry leaders. This figure may not be large in the broad "software" industry, but in the niche track of energy and carbon management, it has already entered the first tier.

The growth curve of Zhihechuang closely coincides with the tightening pace of green policies. The company’s cumulative revenue over the past three years is approximately 156 million yuan, with revenue exceeding 65 million yuan in 2025, and a compound annual growth rate of 35.64% over the past three years. For a service-oriented software company, such growth indicates that customer demand is continuously increasing. The source of this demand is not hard to find: on August 1, 2026, the "Implementation Measures for the Minimum Renewable Energy Consumption Target and the Accountability System for Renewable Energy Power Consumption" (Order No. 42 of 2026) came into effect, listing the first batch of industries—such as electrolytic aluminum, steel, cement, polysilicon, and new data centers—under mandatory green power consumption assessments; the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other departments promoting zero-carbon factory and zero-carbon park construction have turned the ability to account for and trace energy and carbon data into a mandatory condition for industrial enterprises to apply for green certification. Each step of policy tightening expands the market for energy and carbon management.

Zhiheshang's entry point is very specific: industrial green microgrids. Unlike the large-scale energy management systems on the power generation side, the energy scenarios within industrial enterprises are extremely fragmented—a production line has lighting, air conditioning, air compressors, motors, cooling towers, as well as rooftop photovoltaics, on-site energy storage, charging piles, and other distributed resources, with data in various formats and incompatible communication protocols. Zhiheshang's product concept is to uniformly connect, measure, and schedule these devices, and then add carbon accounting capabilities to form a 'end-edge-cloud' collaborative energy-carbon closed loop. In terms of technical implementation, the system is compatible with mainstream industrial communication protocols such as Modbus, IEC 61850, MQTT, and OPC UA, and performs high-precision data collection for multiple types of equipment such as photovoltaics, wind power, and energy storage batteries. The data collection accuracy reaches level 0.5 (error not exceeding 0.5%), and the dynamic carbon factor accounting error is controlled within 3%. In other words, for every kilowatt-hour of electricity the enterprise uses, the system can accurately calculate its carbon emissions, the proportion of green electricity, and the cost structure.

The core selling point of this system is the 'dual control of electricity and carbon.' Traditional energy management systems only manage electricity, while carbon accounting often relies on manually compiling reports at the end of the year. In contrast, Zhihechuang's technical solution incorporates carbon costs into energy dispatch decisions—when formulating equipment operation strategies, it simultaneously considers electricity price curves and carbon factor curves, using a multi-objective optimization model to find the optimal combination of electricity cost and carbon emissions while meeting production constraints. According to publicly available corporate information, this technology can reduce carbon intensity by 10% to 15% and increase the proportion of self-consumed green electricity by over 15%. For industrial enterprises, these two figures directly translate into two financial benefits: one is a reduction in electricity bills, and the other is a decrease in costs related to carbon disclosure, green certification, and export compliance. Against the backdrop of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entering the formal taxation stage and the national carbon market expanding to include steel, cement, and aluminum smelting, the latter financial benefit is gaining weight rapidly.

Zhihechuang's technical foundation is half derived from long-term service to power grid customers. The company is a co-construction unit of Shandong University's 'Cloud, Big Data, IoT, Mobile' joint laboratory and 'Artificial Intelligence' laboratory, has established the Shandong Provincial Software Engineering Technology Center, holds 17 authorized invention patents and 51 software copyrights, covering areas such as integrated source-grid-load-storage charging collaborative scheduling, AI power forecasting, closed-loop control of energy and carbon data, and smart charging station resource scheduling; its software engineering capability has passed CMMI5 certification. Public information shows that its products and solutions have been implemented in leading power industry enterprises such as State Grid Shandong, State Grid Shanxi, and State Grid Liaoning, and it also serves over 30 clients in industries including energy, electricity, tobacco, steel, electronics manufacturing, chemical, and automobile manufacturing. Serving the power grid first, and then industrial users, this path has built a bridge between 'understanding the power system' and 'understanding industrial enterprises'.

Looking from October 2026, the sector that Zhihechuang is in is迎来 a triple-overlap window. The first is the policy window: Order No. 42 turns the proportion of green electricity consumption into an annual assessment, and key energy-using enterprises must make up the shortfall with green certificates within three months. Those overdue will be interviewed, publicly reported, and included in credit records; the National Energy Administration is working with the State Administration for Market Regulation to draft implementation opinions for the Green Power Consumption Certification System, and the application scenarios for green certificates will extend to green finance, green supply chains, and ESG disclosure. The second is the market window: in the first quarter of 2026, the nationwide transaction volume of green certificates was 240 million, a year-on-year increase of 21.19%, with an average price of 5.13 yuan per certificate, more than doubling year-on-year; in August, the nationwide transaction volume of green certificates was 60.55 million, a year-on-year increase of 25.18%. The expansion of green certificate transactions means that industrial enterprises' energy-carbon management demand has shifted from "whether to do it" to "how to do it faster and more accurately." The third is the technology window: technologies such as AI prediction, digital twins, and blockchain traceability are maturing rapidly, and the capability boundaries of energy-carbon management systems are expanding from "accounting" to "scheduling" and "decision-making."

Of course, competition in this sector is also heating up rapidly. Large energy companies' carbon energy platforms, integrated energy service companies within the power grid system, and a number of startups entering from carbon consulting and integrated energy services are all converging on the same market. Compared with these competitors, Zhihechuang's advantage lies in its focus: it does not aim to be a large, all-encompassing energy internet platform, but only provides a carbon energy closed loop in industrial microgrid scenarios; its disadvantage also lies in its focus: its customer base mainly consists of small and medium-sized enterprises, single project order values are limited, and its revenue scale is still below 100 million yuan. Public data shows that the company's revenue in 2025 exceeds 65 million yuan, making it a "small but specialized" player in the industry's first tier. How to expand its customer base while maintaining technical depth is the next question it needs to address.

The industry-wide pressure of 'increasing revenue without increasing profit' also applies to Zhihechuang. The energy carbon management industry is highly service-oriented, relies heavily on project-based delivery, and has a high proportion of labor costs, which can easily dilute gross profit margins; moreover, clients' budget cycles are closely linked to policy rhythms, resulting in uneven order distribution. Among peer companies, some have more than doubled their revenue yet remain in a loss-making state, while others rely on carbon asset reserves to support their valuation, with their profit models not fully established. The technical path chosen by Zhihechuang—software productization, standard protocol integration, and cloud-edge-end collaboration—relieves dependence on labor to some extent, but whether product reuse rates can be increased and delivery costs reduced still depends on subsequent operational data.

It is also worth noting the changes in business structure brought about by the rhythm of policies. After the implementation of Order No. 42, the focus of demand for carbon management services is shifting from 'energy saving and consumption reduction' to 'compliance with green power consumption.' The most pressing issue for enterprises is no longer 'how to save electricity,' but 'is my proportion of green power consumption sufficient, how many green certificates am I short of, and what is the most cost-effective way to make up the difference?' This means that carbon management systems need to integrate with the data from green certificate trading and green power transactions to help enterprises monitor the progress toward their proportion targets in real time. Whoever is the first to establish this link will gain an advantage in the next annual assessment cycle. In May 2026, Zhihéchuang signed an agreement to enter Qizhidao Sci-Tech Innovation Space, leveraging 'big data and large models' to upgrade the digital intelligence capability of clean energy, which is clearly also reserving technology for this round of demand upgrades.

Placing the story of Zhihechuang into a larger context, it represents the growth path of a typical company in China's energy services industry: without owning power plants or holding grid assets, it relies solely on software capabilities and an understanding of policies to establish barriers in specialized segments of energy digitalization. The value of such companies lies in being the 'last mile' for policy implementation—no matter how detailed Regulation No. 42 is, it ultimately requires systems capable of calculating green electricity ratios and carbon factors to support the daily operations of each factory. Demand created by regulations needs software to turn it into deliverable products, and this is precisely Zhihechuang's role.

For industrial enterprises, energy and carbon management is transitioning from an 'optional' measure to a 'must-have.' Green electricity consumption assessment, carbon market expansion, export carbon compliance, and green finance credit—all of these require companies to provide reliable energy and carbon data. Those who can efficiently provide this set of data will have an advantage in controlling compliance costs. Zhihe Chuang has spent 14 years refining products in the industrial microgrid sector, catching up with the convergence of policy and market timing. What is worth tracking next is its order performance in the first full assessment year under Order No. 42, as well as whether the level of productization can support a further leap in revenue scale.

(The information and data in this article are sourced from: public information and business records of Shandong Zhihe Chuang Information Technology Co., Ltd., reports from China.com on May 11, 2026, Phoenix News on May 11, 2026, the 'Implementation Measures for the Minimum Proportion of Renewable Energy Consumption and the Responsibility Weight System for Renewable Energy Power Consumption' by the National Development and Reform Commission and three other departments (Order No. 42 of 2026), and the National Energy Administration's green certificate issuance and trading data as of August 2026.)

[Research Supporting Organization: 'China Industrial News' Energy and Dual-Carbon Research Center | China Energy Industry Development Network]