Acquisition and investment dollars flowed in recent weeks across the distributed energy spectrum, from rooftop solar through the middle market and into data centers, topped by Vertiv’s potentially $2.6 billion move to acquire UtilityInnovation Group (UIG).
UIG, a Raleigh, North Carolina microgrid company founded in 2020 by former PowerSecure CEO Sidney Hinton, has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Vertiv, a data center infrastructure supplier, for about $1.45 billion in cash at closing, with another $1.15 billion available if UIG meets specified earnings targets over the following 12 and 24 months.
The deal puts an unusually high valuation on a relatively young, quiet microgrid company. The purchase price is about 13 times UIG’s expected 2027 EBITDA.
UIG’s website and Vertiv’s public Securities and Exchange Commission filings disclose little about its project activity. Vertiv says the company has designed and delivered microgrids for AI data center operators in the U.S. and Europe.
Publicly announced activity by UIG includes:
- The company teamed in 2025 with EPC Power, which specializes in high-performance power conversion systems, to deploy an advanced power system for AI data centers.
- In 2024, UIG teamed with Volvo, one of its investment partners, on a mobile charging unit for fast-charging larger equipment onsite without a converter. At the time, Volvo said it teamed with UIG because of its expertise in integrating multiple assets to maximize on- and off-grid charging.
Vertiv supplies the power and cooling infrastructure inside data centers. Owning UIG would allow Vertiv to extend its reach upstream to utility interconnection and on-site power supply.
Vertiv CEO Gio Albertazzi said the acquisition would create “coordinated architecture from source to chip without tying customers to a single generation technology or supplier.”
Acquisition money moves down the DER scale
The Vertiv deal is by far the largest recent distributed energy acquisition. Still, it isn’t the only sign that buyers are putting money into companies and assets operating closer to the customer.
New York clean energy investment firm Aligned Climate Capital has held a first close on a fund targeting $500 million for mid-market distributed solar and storage projects.
The investors include the Bush Foundation and others already participating in the firm’s earlier funds.
Aligned expects to begin making investments through the new fund —Aligned Solar Partners 7 — in the coming months and has identified more than 500 MW of potential projects. It will use the capital to acquire construction-ready distributed solar and storage projects, finance construction and operate them.
The investment firm sees mid-market distributed energy growing increasingly important as power demand rises and gas turbines face multi-year delivery delays.
“Distributed solar and energy storage are now among the fastest ways to add reliable capacity to the grid, and the middle market is where much of that build-out actually happens,” said Peter Davidson, CEO of Aligned Climate Capital. “These projects need specialized financing and execution, which is what we have built the firm to do. The continued support from our investors gives us the capital to keep acquiring and building construction-ready projects.”
Aligned says it has acquired 56 projects, many of them community solar, across 10 states, since it launched its Solar Partners strategy in 2018. Aligned acquires, finances, owns and operates US distributed solar and energy-storage projects typically in the 1–50 MW range.
Otovo expands its services business
Meanwhile, Otovo, which provides services for home solar and other behind-the-meter systems, signed definitive agreements on Aug. 24 for its $11 million acquisition of Green Panel Solar Energy Systems. Green Panel services residential and commercial solar, batteries, EV chargers and load-management equipment and operates a solar command-and-control center in Israel.
The combination gives Otovo, led by former Sunnova CEO John Berger, operations across 15 European markets.
Three days later, Otovo announced letters of intent for another $4.6 million in acquisitions, this time of PV Hawaii, a solar O&M provider, and Norwegian solar and electrical contractor Mr. Elektro. The Hawaii deal would extend Otovo’s behind-the-meter services business into the state, while the European acquisition adds installation and service capacity in Norway and Sweden.
The three companies — UIG, Aligned and Otovo — operate at very different levels of distributed energy: from maintaining rooftop solar and batteries to aggregating portfolios of commercial-scale projects to designing multi-megawatt microgrids for AI data centers. So the deals underscore that growing demand for onsite energy is animating the acquisition market from different angles and for different reasons.
Another recent deal illustrates the adjacent infrastructure opportunity. ARRAY Technologies completed its acquisition of Affordable Wire Management on Aug. 31. ARRAY agreed to pay approximately $203 million for AWM, which provides cable-management and balance-of-system equipment used in solar and battery storage projects. ARRAY specifically identified distributed generation, battery storage and data center infrastructure as growth markets for the acquired business.
Taken together, the transactions suggest that investors aren’t chasing one particular distributed energy technology, but are buying different pieces of the infrastructure to bring power closer to the customer and then maintain and operate it after it’s built. This comes as distributed energy gains traction as a means to ensure power supply as demand grows and it becomes more difficult to interconnect to the grid.
