At the end of another year, I find myself reflecting on the challenges and opportunities of the last 12 months, and feeling energized about the opportunities ahead. Each year, the urgency of enabling a clean energy future becomes even more critical. To put it in perspective, 2024 was the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023. We saw more extreme weather events, including 4 tropical cyclone events and the unforgettable Hurricane Helene that devastated inland North Carolina.
Yet, I’m as optimistic as ever that we can – and must – accelerate decarbonization and enable the flexible, resilient grid our clean energy future depends on. The trends are undeniable: incentives and lower costs are accelerating the adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs). California supplied 100% of their electricity with renewable resources for 100 days in 2024 and renewables accounted for 90% of new generation in 2024.
Residential electrification, combined with commercial and industrial load growth from data centers, manufacturing, and more are set to drive electricity demand by 128 GWs over the next five years. The good news? Electric load can be managed load, leveraging DERs as a resource. And clean energy technology companies are poised to meet these trends with digital decarbonization technologies. According to S&P Global, clean energy tech investment is forecasted near $800 billion this year, growing to $1 trillion dollars by 2030.
Our collective success depends on partnering energy providers and energy customers to shape, shift, and shave this new energy load, harnessing electrification in a way that benefits the customer, the energy provider, the ecosystem, and the grid. Now in our fifth year (and even longer with our legacy companies), Uplight deeply understands energy customers and the energy landscape. Our business is focused on the industry’s most pressing need: enabling North American energy providers to leverage customers as a key resource to deliver on their decarbonization, grid resiliency, and grid flexibility goals.
Uplight is better positioned than ever. This year we acquired AutoGrid, creating the market’s first and only integrated platform to conserve, deploy, manage, and monetize distributed DERs. We already have 4.9 GW of flexible load under management and are partnering with even more utilities and ecosystem partners to grow the size and impact everyday.
We will continue to leverage our market leadership and deep expertise across rates, demand response, virtual power plants, and our industry-leading grid edge DERMS. Our customer engagement and enrollment capabilities will drive customer engagement and participation as we continue to invest in extending customer insights and journeys to other utility and partner channels through scalable software and APIs. We’ll lead the way in driving load flexibility as a reliable resource with a single pane of glass to optimize distributed energy resources – all in service of maximizing customer and grid value.
Uplight’s mission has never been more critical than it is today. Doubling down on our ability to connect customers with load flexibility programs in North America and harness the power of DERs remains crucial to our collective fight against climate change. We’re confident about the impact we can drive together in 2025 and beyond.
