virtual-power-plants
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Connected Energy Outlived Its First Big Bet - Then Turned 4,500 Farm Pumps Into a Virtual Power Plant
A Pittsburgh smart-grid company survived the collapse of its original broadband thesis by learning to control the least glamorous machines on the grid. Its reward: a utility software business built around farm pumps, real-time measurement and a newly acquired second act inside CLEAResult.
Matthew Irvin Is Teaching the Grid to Use Time
The Maplewell Energy co-founder spent his career around power plants and utility constraints. Now he is betting that smarter timing - from refrigerated drinks to distributed batteries - can make the electric system more flexible.
Maplewell Wants Your Building to Act Like a Battery - Before the Grid Sends the Bill
The Boulder startup is teaching batteries, refrigerators and microgrids to anticipate the expensive hour. Its pitch is simple: make demand flexible before building more supply.
Jon Kornik Is Teaching the Grid to Ask Homes for Help
The Plentify co-founder spent a career financing clean energy. Then he found a cheaper grid resource hiding in plain sight: the household appliances already waiting to be told when to switch on.
The Tiny Box Behind Every Solar Panel Is Enphase's Big Bet
Enphase turned the least glamorous part of rooftop solar into a platform. Now its panel-level microinverters anchor a connected system for making, storing, using, and selling household power.
NRG Wants to Run the Power Plant - and Your Thermostat
NRG spent years becoming a retailer you might meet on an electricity bill. Now it is joining power plants, smart homes and flexible demand into one system - a bet that the winner in the next energy cycle will understand both sides of the meter.
SwitchDin
SwitchDin is a Newcastle, Australia-based energy technology company that builds software and edge hardware to make distributed energy resources (DER) - rooftop solar, home and grid batteries, EV chargers and controllable loads - visible, controllable and orchestrable at scale. Its Stormcloud cloud platform and Droplet edge controllers create a common, vendor-neutral language across different brands of inverters and batteries, letting utilities, retailers and network operators run microgrids, virtual power plants and flexible-export programs. Founded in 2014 by Dr Andrew Mears, the company works with major Australian utilities including Horizon Power, Ausgrid, AGL, Origin and Western Power, and helped deliver a world-first renewable-only microgrid run in Onslow, WA.
Texture
Texture is a New York-based climate-tech company building the operating system for the energy grid. Its AI-native software platform connects to any meter, device, or data source - solar arrays, batteries, EVs, AMI and SCADA feeds - and gives electric utilities, cooperatives, virtual power plant operators, and grid-services companies a single place to enroll devices, monitor the distribution system in real time, run demand-response and flexibility programs, and measure performance. Founded in 2023 by Sanjiv Sanghavi (co-founder of ClassPass), Texture aims to break the manufacturer 'walled gardens' that keep distributed energy resources from working together.
Sanjiv Sanghavi
Sanjiv Sanghavi is the co-founder and CEO of Texture, a New York company building an operating system for the distributed energy grid that ingests data from batteries, solar, EVs, chargers and smart devices and lets utilities act on it in real time. He co-founded ClassPass before fitness was a category, ran product as CPO at the supply-side energy giant Arcadia, and now wires together a fragmented grid that was built to push power one direction and is being asked to do the opposite. Texture has raised roughly $23M and counts more than 50 OEM integrations including Tesla, FranklinWH and SolarEdge.