Today, we are announcing the next step in AutoGrid’s evolution as we join forces with Uplight.
When I agreed to lead AutoGrid, I looked across our company and saw enormous opportunities to benefit our customers, empower the people and businesses they serve, and contribute to climate action. All of this was unfolding within a landscape of explosive market interest and demand. Today’s announcement represents a milestone inflection point in that journey.
Since 2011, AutoGrid has worked to combat the climate crisis and accelerate access to resilient, affordable, and sustainable energy on a global scale. Leading energy companies around the world rely on AutoGrid to unlock the full potential of distributed energy resources (DERs). By combining with Uplight, we will broaden our reach and deliver even greater outcomes for utilities, grid-scale asset and microgrid owners/operators, new energy players—and most importantly, the planet.
Together, we will not only bring additional value to utility residential and business customers who enroll grid-connected devices, but broaden the ecosystem of participating devices and provide an end-to-end solution to expand, manage, integrate, orchestrate, and monetize DERs––all from a single, unified data platform.
In addition, we are excited about how this combination will better enable us to deliver:
- Improved Customer Recruitment, Engagement, and Satisfaction: For DER OEMs, the effort and cost of customer acquisition and enrollment are an unnecessary pain point that Uplight’s unrivaled engagement platform can solve. Similarly, Virtual Power Plant (VPP) engagement creates opportunity for OEM client cross-sell and upsell. Uplight puts this value firmly within reach.
- Increased Revenue Opportunities: With more assets, better targeting and engagement offerings, and a resulting increase in VPPs to plug into, large asset owners/operators will have more opportunities to monetize the capacity they bring to the table. As our VPPs increase in number and scale, grid-scale asset owners/operators will benefit from resulting multiplier effects.
- Modernized UX/UI: For energy retailers, the combined company’s increased resources and ongoing investments in creating industry-leading UX/UI will support both retail clients’ use of our solutions as well as their customers’ use of them. User satisfaction will increase at every level.
- Support for Corporate ESG Goals: By accelerating VPP creation and scale and creating new opportunities for OEMs, energy retailers, and other energy players to spur participation, the combined company will contribute to customers’ ESG impact.
Not only are the vision, goals, capabilities, and product suites of AutoGrid and Uplight aligned, but our cultures are also very similar. We are committed to the same values: mission-driven, customer-focused, and outcomes-obsessed. I look forward to our two companies coming together as one team and seeing all that we can accomplish together.
Finally, I have been fortunate enough to build much of my career at Schneider Electric. With this combination of Uplight and AutoGrid, I see Schneider’s industry-leading commitment to business innovation and sustainability. Building, shaping, and redefining markets is in our DNA. With Schneider’s ongoing investment in Uplight, the opportunities for continued evolution and impact are endless.
Read the full press release here and stay tuned to learn more about Uplight and the combined capabilities we will bring to the market.
This agreement is subject to regulatory approval.
