Uplight today announced continued scale and momentum across its demand flexibility portfolio, demonstrating the impact of coordinated, customer-powered load flexibility in meeting rising electricity demand and maintaining grid reliability,while keeping costs down for customers. Alongside its utility partners, Uplight’s summer season behavioral and device-based demand response (DR) and virtual power plant (VPP) programs shifted 15,629 megawatt hours (MWh), enough energy to power all of the households in the City of Dallas for a day.
Summer is the grid’s annual stress test, and 2026 was no different: the contiguous U.S. experienced its hottest summer on record. To meet higher peaks and continued load growth, this summer season Uplight:
- Grew dispatchable capacity: Increased residential dispatchable capacity by more than 75% and grew program enrollments to more than 1 million encompassing behavioral demand response (BDR), smart thermostats, electric vehicles, and batteries.
- Increased dispatch frequency: Ran 1,807 events across the summer season, calling on flexible resources 5 times more often in July and August when hot weather strained the grid the most.
- Called on more device classes: Dispatched 70% more batteries and two times more electric vehicles, further expanding the range of available device classes and exponentially increasing available flexible capacity.
- Mitigated peak load: Dispatched 735 megawatts (MW) during the week of August 30, enough to power two large hyperscaler data centers, and nearly doubling dispatch compared to the peak week of 2025.
- Unlocked latent capacity: Supercharged behavioral demand response enrollments by over 5 times from 2025 to 2026 and delivered over 20% of total load shift through behavioral programs.
In addition to scaling traditional opt-in, device-based programs, Uplight continues to drive adoption of innovative, rapidly deployable Built-In Flexibility offerings. By leveraging smart program design and device manufacturer partnerships, Built-In Flexibility unlocks the latent capacity already present in customer homes to scale DRand VPPprograms. Tapping into existing customer capacity gives utilities another tool in their belt to address a diverse range of grid challenges, from peak load reduction to localized constraints. The results are proven: one Midwestern utility used Uplight’s opt-out BDR solution to deliver 800 MW across nine summer events, while a Southwestern utility more than doubled its critical peak capacity by dispatching microadjustments to enrolled smart thermostats.
“Demand-side capacity is no longer optional. It is essential to improving grid utilization, delivering capacity quickly, and keeping energy affordable for customers across North America,” said Hannah Bascom, General Manager at Uplight. “This summer, our demand flexibility portfolio demonstrated the growing impact of demand-side solutions, with more participants, more events, and a shift in how utilities view customers: as resources. When flexibility is managed as a connected portfolio rather than siloed programs, utilities can orchestrate it around system needs, unlocking more capacity and deploying it precisely when the grid needs it.”
The summer performance builds on Uplight’s next phase of growth, which focuses on expanding flexible capacity under management to 20 GW and bringing $1 billion in savings to energy customers over the next five years.
To read the full summer findings and Uplight’s latest insights on scaling demand-side flexibility, read the latest edition of The State of Demand-Side Readiness report.
Uplight is a clean energy technology company that unlocks grid capacity by activating customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy. Uplight enables sustainable load growth by combining personalized customer experiences with an open, flexible load management platform through the Uplight Demand Stack: integrating energy efficiency, electrification, rates, and flexibility programs to improve grid resilience, reduce costs, and accelerate decarbonization for both energy providers and their customers.
Uplight serves over 80 energy providers, including 8 of the 10 largest North American utilities, and is a certified B-Corporation whose purpose is to create a more sustainable future using business as a force for good. To learn more about Uplight, visit https://uplight.com/.
