Octopus Energy and Uplight announced on September 1, 2026 that Octopus has completed its majority investment in Uplight. This is a close, not a signing: the deal was announced in March and has now finished. Schneider Electric, already an investor, stays on alongside the new majority holder, and Uplight keeps operating independently under Nick Chaset, who also runs Octopus Energy US.
Uplight is a Boulder, Colorado company that sells demand management to energy providers: demand response programmes, a DER management system and virtual power plants built over smart thermostats, electric vehicles and behind-the-meter batteries. It manages 8.5 GW of flexible load across more than 85 utilities and over 75 ecosystem partners, including eight of the ten largest utilities in the United States, with more than a million enrolled customer devices. The stated target is 20 GW and a billion dollars of customer savings within five years.
The deal is North American and sits outside the European market Plugchoice works in, so this is a watch item rather than news that changes anything today. What makes it worth filing is the direction of travel. An energy retailer buying the flexibility and device-orchestration layer outright is the clearest version of a pattern that also shows up closer to home: the same company already sells a bundled wallbox and tariff in Germany.
For a site owner the practical question stays the same one it always was. If the flexibility layer, the tariff and the charger all come from one supplier, switching any one of them means switching all three. A charger that speaks plain OCPP to a backend you choose keeps those decisions separate.
Sources: GlobeNewswire, Uplight, energy-storage.news.