Cascade Energy Acquires Yield Energy to Address Load Growth for Utilities and Large Energy Users

Cascade Energy, a 100% employee-owned energy management, sustainability, and technology company serving utilities, businesses, and the public sector, announced today that it has acquired Yield Energy (Polaris Energy Services, Inc., dba Yield Energy), a California company that turns agricultural load into flexible capacity for the grid. Yield brings a 200 MW portfolio of agricultural demand flexibility and an automated distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) to Cascade’s existing portfolio. The acquisition increases Cascade’s ability to help utilities and large energy users unlock grid capacity and reduce operating costs.

Large energy users need more electricity to expand, but many are being told that additional capacity is unavailable or years away. At the same time, rising utility rates are putting further pressure on operating costs. Utilities, meanwhile, must keep pace with rapid load growth while managing customer resistance to the cost of new generation and grid infrastructure. 

The answer increasingly lies in demand flexibility, shifting and reducing load in response to grid needs and price signals. For utilities, that means a faster, lower-cost alternative to building new capacity. For data centers and other large new loads, it means a shorter path to energization, leveraging capacity from flexibility that already exists on the grid. For industrial, agricultural, and commercial energy users, it means lower energy spend, and in many cases, a new revenue stream from existing operations.

Together, Cascade and Yield will deliver demand flexibility at a significantly larger scale, both on-farm and across industrial and commercial operations nationwide. For customers with flexible load of their own, the combined business will enroll existing equipment and turn that flexibility into revenue. Those facing capacity limits can cover part of their peak obligation with flexibility drawn from other operations on the same grid.

Cascade already supports industrial and commercial customers across the country, combining deep energy management and engineering expertise with deep understanding of site and system operations. Pairing that reach and expertise with Yield's platform brings demand flexibility to more businesses sooner.

Yield's programs put money back into farm operations, paying growers for flexibility from irrigation equipment already in place. Yield built the platform and grower relationships that make agricultural load dispatchable at scale. Together, Cascade and Yield will bring this model to growers in more regions and extend the same approach to Cascade’s broader base of industrial and commercial customers.

“Utilities and their customers are under real pressure from load growth, and demand flexibility is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to relieve it,” said Dan Brown, Chief Executive Officer of Cascade Energy. “Yield built technology that turns flexible load into dependable capacity and has proven it in agriculture. Together we bring that to more customers in more places, and we are thrilled to welcome them to Cascade.”

Yield will operate as a business unit within Cascade, led by Tyler Nuss, with the team collaborating across Cascade to rapidly expand Cascade’s demand flexibility offerings.

“We built a way for growers to get paid for flexibility they already have, and they have been getting paid for it season after season,” said Tyler Nuss of Yield Energy. “Cascade already works with thousands of industrial and commercial facilities and knows how they run, so far more customers can benefit from our platform, and much sooner than we could reach them on our own.”