March 27
Octopus Energy Takes Majority Stake in Uplight
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Octopus Energy Group will acquire a majority stake in the distributed energy resource management company Uplight, the pair announced this week. Schneider Electric, an existing Uplight investor, is also investing, maintaining a minority stake and leaving Uplight as an independent company, albeit one with greater certainty and runway.
Texas public power utility Austin Energy is launching an innovative battery demand response pilot program designed to give customers new ways to support grid reliability while earning performance awards. The Power Partner Battery pilot encourages residential customers to purchase and install home battery storage systems. Homeowners will receive $500 upfront to purchase a new battery to store excess energy.
Georgia Power awarded contracts in the largest set of distributed generation solar power purchase agreements in the company’s history. The contracts were awarded after the Georgia Public Service Commission’s recently approved 16 new contracts, totaling 70 MW of new third-party. Georgia Power’s RFPs give solar developers an opportunity to commit to long-term power purchase agreements for projects ranging from 250 kW to 6 MW.
There is perhaps no one as immediately recognizable and unifying as Dolly Parton. Unsurprisingly, Parton can teach everyone – including the energy industry – the value of not just staying true to yourself, but in using that compassion to build rapport and educate her audience on the most important things. So, what can Dolly Parton’s music teach us about utility customer engagement?
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Industry News
As data centers drive the first major surge in electricity demand in decades, tens of millions of utility customers, particularly in PJM, are already seeing higher bills. But a new report from The Brattle Group suggests that load growth could actually help lower rates – if utilities prioritize technologies that free up grid capacity without building new poles and wires.
Electricity from utility-scale wind and solar is making up a steadily increasing share of the U.S. generation mix and rose to a cumulative 17% last year, according to the Energy Information Administration. Though wind generated more electricity in 2025 than utility-scale solar did – 464,000 GWh compared with 296,000 GWh – solar capacity saw the larger increase, rising 34% compared to wind’s 3%, according to the report.
A record 18.9 GW of battery energy storage systems were installed in 2025, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and Wood Mackenzie. The record number of installations represents a 52% increase over 2024. The fourth quarter of 2025 closed with the strongest quarterly totals on record with 5.8 GW installed. Utility-scale installations accounted for 4.9 GW of the fourth quarter total, up 31% over the previous year.
Lawmakers in Michigan and New York are considering bills that would require the states’ utility regulators and major electric utilities to develop virtual power plant programs open to third-party aggregators. Both bills envision VPP programs that pay distributed energy resource owners for alleviating stress on the electric grid during periods of peak demand, and possibly for ancillary services, such as voltage support.
