When GridPoint formed more than two decades ago, batteries were central to its business plan. But it was as very different company then and batteries were a very different product.
Today, the Virginia-based company manages energy use for 21,000 customer sites across the US, and batteries have moved from an expensive form of backup power to a mass-produced energy resource that can compete in electricity markets, lower commercial power bills and provide grid services.
The Reston, Virginia-based company announced Nov. 4 that it plans to deploy 2 GW of batteries at commercial buildings across the country and that its co-founder Adrian De Luca has returned as CEO to lead the battery push.
Selling batteries to small commercial and industrial customers—think multi-state retail chains like Walgreens, Panda Express, and Wendy’s—is notoriously difficult and can bring high costs for customer acquisition, design, and installation. Those economics have helped keep small-commercial buildings on the sidelines of the battery boom.
In 2025, the entire U.S. community, commercial and industrial storage sector installed just 191 MW, compared with about 16 GW of utility-scale batteries, according to Wood Mackenzie.
GridPoint is banking on leveraging the energy management customers it has cultivated over the years.
From batteries to energy management — and back
When De Luca and co-founder Peter Corsell started GridPoint in 2003, they envisioned a network of distributed energy systems equipped with batteries and potentially renewable generation.
Every product the company sold during its early years contained a battery, generally using lead-acid or nickel-metal hydride technology.
When that didn’t prove out, GridPoint shifted to helping commercial businesses manage electricity consumption, finding an underserved market: large companies operating hundreds or thousands of relatively small buildings.
Traditional building-control companies tended to focus on hospitals, office towers and campuses, where expensive, customized systems made economic sense.
“They couldn’t create a repeatable process to deal with that many locations,” De Luca said in an interview with Energy Changemakers.
So GridPoint moved to another model — managing HVAC, refrigeration, lighting, and other equipment across multi-site commercial customers, like retail chains, ideally with 500 or more locations. This allows GridPoint to serve thousands of buildings with a relatively small number of corporate customers.
The model enabled the company to acquire detailed electricity consumption data and build a subscription business that provides equipment, software, installation, and services without requiring large upfront customer investments.
Now it plans to use that foundation to sell batteries.
Can an existing customer base change the economics?
Even though battery costs have fallen and the technology has improved, small commercial storage still presents some significant challenges, especially around the cost and difficulty of customer acquisition and installation, that utility scale batteries are spared.
GridPoint believes it can reduce some of those costs because it already has customer relationships, equipment at the sites and detailed energy-use histories.
“How do you think at the portfolio level, not at the individual project level?” De Luca said.
The goal is to make battery installations more repeatable — the holy grail for so many distributed technologies — rather than engineering every project from scratch.
GridPoint’s initial proposals involve batteries of roughly 100–500 kW. Individually, they’re relatively small. Across thousands of buildings, they could add up to significant capacity.
The company is not alone in seeing the value of the once neglected small to medium commercial market.
Budderfly, an energy-as-a-service provider serving restaurants and other commercial businesses, announced a partnership with Viridi in June 2026 to install batteries at about 100 existing customer locations, with plans for thousands more. Like GridPoint, it’s leveraging established customer relationships and an existing energy services business.
David Energy is taking a different approach in New York City, installing small plug-in batteries that avoid much of the complexity and expense of conventional commercial storage installations. In August 2026, the company announced that it had deployed batteries at 21 locations operated by Wonder, a food technology company with all-electric kitchens. David Energy provides the batteries without upfront equipment costs and manages them to reduce electricity bills. The strategy relies on simpler installations and a retail electricity business that allows David Energy to share the savings with customers.
Why now and where?
GridPoint kept one eye on the battery market over the years, waiting for the economics to improve.
It began seeing a significant shift over the last 18 to 24 months as battery costs, tax incentives and grid-services revenue opportunities made more projects financially attractive.
GridPoint now estimates that about 13,000 of its existing customer locations are in markets where batteries could make economic sense.
California is a prime target, along with parts of PJM and the Northeast, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. De Luca also sees promise in Illinois and New Jersey.
Rising electricity bills make the case
GridPoint has seen energy costs rise about 40% over five years across about 18,000 customer locations. At the same time, tariffs have become more complicated.
“You’re seeing peak and off-peak rates where you didn’t before. You’re seeing higher demand charges and ratchet charges where you didn’t before,” he said.
The company already manages demand charges and drives bill savings — the battery is an added tool. De Luca sees virtual power plant participation and resilience as secondary battery benefits — although it noted in a news release that its customer sites in 26 states saw 1,699 outages due to weather in the last year.
The company will offer the batteries as a turnkey add-on to a customer’s existing energy-as-a-service subscription. Some customers will be paid to host the battery, while others will share the savings through an energy services agreement.
Gridpoint will arrange installation and servicing, manage the equipment, enroll customers in applicable demand response and VPP programs, and coordinate settlement with program partners. Customers who want backup power would need a system designed to reserve capacity for outages, potentially at an additional cost, because reserving battery capacity for resilience diminishes what’s available for bill savings and grid services.
The initial systems will be funded off the company’s balance sheet and later it will move into working with financing partners. The company expects to announce initial projects and partners as the program rolls out.
There’s still a long way to go before GridPoint reaches its 2 GW battery goal. But it’s a fascinating case study in how a company can return to an idea that was ahead of its time, armed with a different business it built along the way.
“We’re in many ways kind of realizing the original vision that Adrian and I had back in 2003, 2004 when we started the company,” said Corsell, now company chairman.
