Uplight
Luis D’Acosta is the CEO of Uplight. Hannah Bascom is Chief Market Innovation Officer of Uplight.
Uplight recently acquired AutoGrid as electrification and digitization are changing the needs of an increasingly distributed and decarbonized energy system. The acquisition centers on the need for active energy customer participation to help provide reliable and flexible capacity as a tool to optimize the modern electric grid, which translates into use of Virtual Power Plants, or VPPs.
This works because AutoGrid is a clean-tech company with software providing a platform to augment energy assets as VPPs across all customer classes, device types, and use cases. It allows energy and utilities companies to take advantage of the forecasted growth in distributed energy resources and use VPPs to help with demand.
To discuss how this acquisition combines Uplight's expertise in energy customer engagement with AutoGrid's flexibility management platform, Public Utilities Fortnightly talked with two leaders: Uplight's Hannah Bascom and Luis D'Acosta provided insights on these important topics.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Uplight has news. Talk about that.
Luis D’Acosta: The grid was not designed to take into account devices behind the meter because we thought we would not be able to communicate with them or predict the way they function. Now, it’s clear that we can, and it would be a terrible societal cost if we neglect to manage and orchestrate those assets.
Hannah Bascom: I'm happy to add the market context and then we can talk specifically about Uplight's acquisition of AutoGrid. On the market side, everyone in this space understands the incredible load-growth forecasts that have been manifesting over the past several years. The Department of Energy estimates that the U.S. alone will need to support two hundred gigawatts of additional peak demand by 2030, which is a huge increase.
At first, it was buzz about electrification of vehicles, homes, and businesses in pursuit of decarbonization. But the news in the past six to twelve months has been the increased demand from data centers due to AI.
We need to rethink how the grid is operating to meet unprecedented load growth. There are also continued challenges with extreme climate events and the need for more flexibility and resiliency, and accommodation of these higher peaks in demand.
A component of that is leveraging Virtual Power Plants. Maybe VPPs are not quite the way to describe it; it's more like distributed power plants. Leveraging all the assets that are in the market in coordination to act like a power plant and meet some of the core generation demands, but also peak demands that are arising.
Hannah Bascom: To build a new peaker plant takes many years. That’s the opportunity of ramping up fast, putting the VPP in service of the grid, and having people participate. It’s a community and sustainability angle.
It's exciting that now we have the opportunity to leverage the connected customer journey capabilities that Uplight has, paired with the load flexibility side of distributed energy resource deployments.
Luis D'Acosta: On February ninth, we concluded the acquisition of AutoGrid to strengthen the capabilities of Uplight around everything that is orchestration of distributed resources and renewables. That includes both distributed and large-scale renewables.
Today, with the rise of VPPs, our utility clients need to engage with customers in different ways to enroll in these assets and make sure they are available to dispatch in a reliable way for full decarbonization.
AutoGrid was our missing component to close that cycle, help customers through their electrification journey, find incentives and rates, and opportunities on how to get that electrification journey going, and then connect to the devices in the VPP space.
The integration of companies is going well. We already knew AutoGrid. We were partnering with them. But the cultural match, the mission-driven spirit of both companies works well together.
It extends our current customer relationships and capabilities into more sophisticated orchestration solutions that bring together over 8.4 gigawatts of distributed energy assets spanning five continents.
VPP is more than the traditional demand response program where you push one button and dispatch a lot of assets in a wide area just to shift load. With AutoGrid, we have the opportunity to orchestrate generation of wind, solar, and batteries in front of the meter with everything happening behind the meter, and do so for commercial, industrial, and residential customers.
It's putting everything on one platform.
PUF: The challenge is to engage a critical mass of customers and get them engaged. Can that be done at scale?
Hannah Bascom: Absolutely, and we have a lot to prove. In addition to customer capabilities, we've been working at building out a platform that will enable third-party providers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), et cetera, in an energy ecosystem. People who might today not consider themselves part of the energy ecosystem.
Uplight serves and connects over one hundred ten million customers in the U.S. alone to utility incentives, rate information, and usage information so that customers are more easily able to connect the dots and remove friction from the experience. We've seen how difficult it is for OEMs to manufacture and become energy service providers.
At Nest, I learned it's hard to have a hardware business, be a customer platform, and also have the same nuanced solution set that enables you to connect to all the various energy providers. It's a complicated and fragmented market.
For Uplight, it's essential to bring all those providers into the experience and connect them ultimately with the customer and with the grid to enroll right away into the rates and load-management programs. That's a crucial aspect of what it is we're doing.
As to what we are seeing at scale, we run different programs that have multi-touch points with customers. Our data is showing that when customers have the right education upfront, such as engaging with home energy reports or rate alerts, they are more likely to purchase the device with an incentive applied or to enroll in a load-management program.
We are increasingly seeing these sort of VPPs scale up. We run a VPP for Puget Sound, and it's all asset classes — residential, commercial — and various device types, as well. The goal in Washington State is to serve ten percent of peak demand with VPPs by 2027.
We are over-enrolling relative to where we thought we'd be in the forecast. We are past forty megawatts.
To build a new peaker plant takes many years. That's the opportunity of ramping up fast, putting the VPP in service of the grid, and having people participate. It's a community and sustainability angle.
PUF: What's the potential here? How big can this be?
Hannah Bascom: Brattle and the Department of Energy study on VPPs shows they can serve twenty percent of load in the period between now and 2030. If we design these programs right, it is possible to achieve that potential.
There are lots of places that need to support growing load where there are no gas pipelines. We need to be creative about deploying generation power plant supply in ways that we haven't before.
PUF: What kind of questions are utility leaders asking?
Luis D'Acosta: Demand-side management in the past has been a compliant grid, so it has been energy efficiency first. What we are talking about with customers is complementing energy efficiency with electrification.
A lot of the same practices that we have been refining for a few decades now, are applicable in the electrification play. Instead of being compliance driven, now utilities can drive more use of their commodity. That's instead of the compliance times when they were obligated to promote having people use less of their commodity.
Since electrification is coming, our utility clients are looking for ways to be ahead of the game. Maybe a few years ago they were in a let's wait-and-see mode. Now, utility clients are trying to be that point of insights and advice, and help customers engage on their electrification journey.
With this amount of load coming to the grid, you need to orchestrate assets behind the meter to increase efficiency of the grid. Shame on us. We wasted the intelligence of these devices, the communications we have with these devices today.
In the past, the grid was not designed to take into account devices that were behind the meter because we thought we would not be able to communicate with them or predict the way they function. Now, it's clear that we can, and it would be a terrible societal cost if we neglect to manage and orchestrate those assets.
PUF: Why is Uplight innovative?
Hannah Bascom: I've been at Uplight a bit over a year, but I like to joke that I feel I've been a part of the company all along, since I worked closely with the individual companies that became Uplight even way back in my Nest days.
I've known folks on the team for eight, nine years now, which is remarkable. Uplight, because its heritage is companies that all came together, we've had this unique opportunity to learn from one another and keep the best of breed from all those companies, and then continue to build on that.
It's the people and the fact that we started off as a bunch of different companies that were working on solving this problem, and we've had this amazing opportunity of coming together to amplify our impact. That DNA keeps us going.
Luis D'Acosta: Then it's how to take advantage of that DNA, as we are intentional to keep fostering that innovation. We have hackathons; multiple per quarter.
We are experimenting and trying new things in this space. These companies were born with AI, but now, with the next generation, there are more things coming into our space that allow us to hyper-personalize this journey.
It's what is happening on how to take advantage of next-gen AI, everything that is happening in clean tech, and this intersection between VPPs and connected customer journeys. This is a great time for us, and fun.
We are trying to balance a little bit of the startup way of innovation with the scale-up way. We are investing and innovating in a way that can scale. It's important that we are innovating in ways that will serve a lot of customers and solve bigger problems.
PUF: Talk about your relationship with Schneider Electric.
Luis D'Acosta: Schneider is our largest investor, although not the majority. We are connecting with Schneider to make sure that what's happening on the customer side is well connected to the way we are managing the grid, to the ADMS SCADA system.
Making sure that when we are planning, building, operating, and optimizing how we are using the grid, that we are taking advantage of everything happening behind the meter. All those assets that are owned by customers.
Schneider has an important vision called prosumer to control room. They are investing a lot in hardware for the prosumers. It's microgrids and charging infrastructure, but also in residential batteries and inverters, home energy management systems, and smart panels.
We have a large hardware play. The opportunity we have is to connect with a Schneider ecosystem to orchestrate all those assets and make them available, put in service of the grid and the grid stakeholder.
Connecting with the control room and ADMS is what we are working on closely to make sure that how we use distributed resources would not hurt the grid, which we do for Schneider and other ADMS providers. It's making sure distributed resources are at the service of the grid and all grid users. It's a collaboration with Schneider Electric as an investor and as a technology and commercial partner.
PUF: Where's Uplight going to be in three or so years?
Hannah Bascom: We want to be operating and connecting the largest distributed power plants in the world. North America will continue to be a major focus for us, but via AutoGrid we are also in a number of international markets.
We'll continue to expand into opportunities in other markets. Just as importantly, we will have connected hundreds of millions of customers to those programs in a way that can benefit their bank accounts, enable decarbonization, and benefit the resiliency of the grid.
Luis D'Acosta: We're making sure we provide the conditions for OEMs to connect with customers who want to electrify and connect with the utility that wants to see them electrify and use those assets.
Where the customer wins, the OEM wins because they will be having more equipment in the market, and then the utility wins with more engaged customers and assets that are being orchestrated. We aspire to be that solution for our utility clients, to their customers, and to the ecosystem of OEMs and service providers that our utility clients are ready to serve.
There are millions of customers connected to our utility clients, and more customers that are connected to individual OEMs. How we bridge these two is our biggest opportunity.
It's no longer my customer or your customer, it's our customer. The customer is both the Schneider battery customer and a PGA customer at the same time. How do we bring value together? That is our ambition and our opportunity.
Next, Uplight’s Neil Veilleux and former Illinois Commerce Commission Chair Brien Sheahan examine The Regulator’s Dilemma in Part One of a three-part series of articles. This article looks at the challenges regulators face from rising load growth (due to electrification, data centers, et cetera), retiring fossil fuel dispatchable assets, increasing renewables, and how these trends place increased strain on the grid. They require a new solution that is cost-effective and reliable: enter VPPs.
