As another transformative year in clean and distributed energy comes to a close, the industry has continued its rapid evolution, shaped by policy shifts, technological leaps, and a changing risk landscape. Clean energy is no longer just an environmental priority, it’s a strategic financial and operational decision for businesses, communities, and critical infrastructure. Additionally, a central discussion at almost every energy related industry event or meeting was the unstable future of energy incentives and the price of power. Volatile markets and pricing signals are creating an uncertain and risky future for those relying entirely on the centralized grid. This year, several themes emerged that we believe will define the decade ahead including the continued rise of battery storage, the explosive growth of data centers and AI-driven electricity demand, and a heightened focus on microgrids and strategic multi-asset systems for predictable power and resilience.
By using creative designs and structures, GridMarket has spent the year helping customers scope projects that drive economic and operational success. True energy security and effective price hedging require a diversified approach that leverages a broader array of generation technologies. We are increasingly helping clients integrate a variety of trusted distributed solutions, while simultaneously planning for emerging baseload options. This is where GridMarket’s core expertise lies – our platform analyzes the full spectrum of possibilities to engineer the optimal asset mix, ensuring our customers deploy the exact combination of solutions needed to meet their power, cost, and resiliency targets.
Our team is heading into 2026 focused on coordinating projects that provide stable pricing, operational resiliency, dependable power, and meet any unique customer goals, with or without incentives.
The Evolving Distributed Energy Landscape
Distributed energy continued to mature from niche to mainstream, with renewables, especially solar and wind, making substantial contributions to the energy mix. Yet while generation technologies continued to drop in cost and increase in efficiency, the real story of the year was integration: how to balance variable renewable resources with increasingly unpredictable energy demand in a volatile political ecosystem.
Utilities, developers, and corporations shifted from thinking about clean energy as individual assets to seeing it as part of a whole-system reliability strategy. Grid modernization, microgrids, and hybrid clean-energy systems saw major traction as more organizations sought dependable, decarbonized power.
Battery Storage Steps Into the Spotlight
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) projects surged across the U.S. as developers and organizations sought to strengthen grids, stabilize renewable energy, and meet new forms of demand. While sometimes complex for siting and approvals, storage is increasingly feasible as a standalone solution or as part of a microgrid application.
Battery storage continues to qualify for the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) even as solar projects lose eligibility in coming years, which is accelerating investment in BESS as a hedge against policy shifts. Stakeholders and customers increasingly recognize storage as an essential reliability tool, not just an accessory to solar. Trusted technologies are becoming more cost effective, while new technologies are entering the market and gaining traction. Lithium-ion cost trends remained favorable, and alternative chemistries, like iron-air and sodium-ion, are being used for long-duration or lower-cost applications. High demand commercial and industrial facilities and data centers are increasingly adopting BESS as a way to shift load, manage demand charges, and support resilience objectives. Battery storage is no longer simply a companion to solar, it has become an independent pillar of the clean energy transition.
Many energy consumers over the last year have been partnering with GridMarket to navigate the volatile energy incentive landscape. GridMarket has helped customers in different states and regional markets creatively take advantage of local programs, accelerate processes to secure funds while available, and strategically focus on battery storage ITC savings to make projects continue to pencil and meet internal targets. Customers across the logistics, transportation, and mission critical sectors are leveraging storage in a number of ways to meet their unique energy and operational needs.
Data Centers, AI, and the New Shape of Electricity Demand
The explosive growth of AI and cloud computing reshaped the energy conversation this year. Data centers became one of the fastest-growing electricity loads in North America and globally. Across the industry, discussions shifted from “how do we decarbonize data centers?” to “how do we power them at all?”
The explosive growth of AI training clusters and hyperscale facilities has resulted in a demand for continuous, high-quality power that often exceeds the capabilities of existing utility infrastructure. To bridge this gap, companies are increasingly turning to on-site or near-site clean energy solutions, deploying solar, battery storage, microgrids, and emerging long-duration technologies to ensure reliability. However, this transition presents a number of challenges. Developers and utilities alike are navigating a complex landscape of interconnection queues, permitting delays, and the urgent need for accelerated grid-capacity upgrades, with some regions now going so far as to mandate that new data centers generate their own power to secure approval. This new demand profile is reshaping energy strategy, placing clean energy developers and BESS integrators at the center of the AI-powered economy.
As data centers claim an increasingly large share of grid capacity in already constrained markets, a new dynamic is emerging for other large-scale energy consumers. Industries ranging from cold storage to heavy manufacturing are navigating an everchanging energy ecosystem. This is becoming a powerful catalyst for the adoption of distributed energy solutions. Driven by necessity for future planning and operational resiliency rather than just decarbonization or sustainability goals, these sectors are aggressively pivoting to behind-the-meter assets to secure energy independence and insulate their operations from the growing volatility of power and pricing.
GridMarket has extensive experience working with new build and existing data centers to meet their evolving needs. Specifically, over the past year our team has been helping to scope power generation and procurement strategies, and often identifying temporary power sources, to get data centers up and running in the interim before utilities can make necessary upgrades or additions to meet demand needs. This becomes a strategic conversation around planning and operations to seamlessly transition and keep the data center powered and running, and our team has navigated these challenges in many major markets with all stakeholders, including developers, hyperscalers, utilities, municipalities and end users.
Resilience Against Natural Disasters and Security Threats
Climate-driven extreme weather, cyber risks, and geopolitical instability pushed resilience from a buzzword into a core design requirement this year. Organizations no longer asked if they needed resilient power, they asked how to implement it fastest and most cost-effectively.
Microgrids and distributed assets gained traction as organizations sought power independence during outages. Battery storage increasingly replaced diesel generators for backup power, driven by ESG requirements, permitting challenges, and improved cost competitiveness. Policymakers emphasized grid hardening and reliability programs, especially in regions hit hardest by wildfires, heat waves, and storms. Critical infrastructure, including hospitals, airports, manufacturing, military bases, and municipalities, expanded their reliance on renewable-powered backup systems. With an increasing arsenal of available solutions and technologies in the market and creative opportunities to coordinate generation and storage with facility needs, resilience as a solution and a service was frequently a request from GridMarket customers exploring their energy opportunities.
The takeaway: coordinated distributed energy is now central to preparedness, not just sustainability.
Incentives or Not – Distributed Energy is The Key To Hedging Against Price Increases
Historically, the business case for distributed energy resources like solar and storage hinged heavily on the availability of tax credits and government rebates. While these incentives remain core financial indicators of project viability, they are rapidly becoming secondary to a much more pressing economic reality – volatile and rapidly rising utility rates. As legacy grid infrastructure struggles to cope with modern demands and an unpredictable global fuel market, relying solely on centralized power is increasingly risky. GridMarket has seen aggressive pricing forecasts from utility and customer partners where the introduction of onsite generation and storage is the best path forward to reducing that risk and ultimately making energy costs cheaper in the future.
In this evolving landscape, onsite energy generation has graduated from a subsidized “nice-to-have” into an essential financial hedge. Regardless of the ever changing incentive climate, the true, enduring value of distributed energy now lies in its power to lock in long-term electricity costs, insulating organizations from inevitable price spikes and securing budget certainty regardless of who is in office or what funding is available.
Looking Ahead
As power demands intensify, relying on a single technology is no longer sufficient to guarantee uptime or hedge against volatility. We are seeing a broad need to adopt a diverse array of solutions, ranging from linear generators and biofuels to cleaner natural gas and emerging hydrogen or micro-nuclear options. The projects and partnerships that will succeed going forward will be those that integrate market trends, leverage distributed solutions to secure predictable, stable pricing longterm, move quickly, and adapt to an environment where reliability, flexibility, and sustainability are inseparable. GridMarket’s proprietary analytics are uniquely capable of evaluating these varied technologies via an agnostic, all-at-once approach informed by data, AI, and individualized customer priorities. By identifying the most effective asset mix for every unique scenario, we enable our partners to deploy a truly resilient power infrastructure that balances immediate availability with long-term economic performance.
GridMarket, Wrapped
Over the last year, GridMarket brought over a decade of hands-on energy project facilitation and optimization experience to customers in all 50 states and around the globe. Our project platform has refined analytics and expanded reach to provide preliminary project recommendations for over 2.6 billion opportunities around the world. We significantly enhanced our proprietary analytics engine, leveraging advanced AI to transform complex data into actionable insights. These updates continue streamlining the entire project lifecycle, reducing assessment times while increasing predictive accuracy, and empowering our partners to confidently identify high-value opportunities and deploy capital more efficiently than ever before. Helping property portfolios maximize project value across all their sites with a coordinated approach remains a core business focus, with data centers and energy-intensive logistics and manufacturing making up the largest percentage of GridMarket’s new clients going into this new year. Our team completed thousands of detailed analyses and system designs, providing essential technology and financial recommendations. We then advanced many of these initiatives through our RFP process and into fully contracted projects. We expanded our team and analytical capabilities with additional expertise in new technologies and financial structures to continue making the most informed agnostic recommendations to our partners. Our channel partner network continues to grow, as we look to work with complementary solutions to bring our customers the greatest value for their businesses and operations.
GridMarket is grateful to everyone who has been part of our story in 2025, and we are looking forward to an exciting 2026!