EnerNOC Loses Its Crown as the Last of the Pure-Play Public Demand Response Companies

And then there were none. All the pure-play energy efficiency and demand response (DR) public companies have now been gobbled up by large industry players. First, Comverge went private in 2011 and was recently acquired by Itron. Then Opower was bought by Oracle in 2016. Now EnerNOC has been acquired by Enel Green Power North America (EGP-NA) for $300 million. It was no secret that this was going to happen, as EnerNOC had essentially put itself on the auction block earlier this year. The only suspense was who the buyer would be. I don’t know anyone that had EGP-NA in their betting pool. I saw EnerNOC’s CEO Tim Healy at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual conference in Boston last week, and he did a great job keeping his poker face on.

The likely scenarios seemed to include either being taken private by a private equity company, like what happened with Comverge, or being bought by a large vendor like General Electric (GE) or Schneider Electric. It was not probable that a US utility would be in the mix. But European utilities like ENGIE have been active in getting footholds in the US distributed energy resources (DER) market with more customer-facing solutions. EGP-NA had been one of the quieter ones. By adding the EnerNOC deal to its recent acquisition of energy storage software/project developer Demand Energy, EGP-NA has pushed itself toward the forefront of this market.

A Lot of Opportunity

EGP-NA has no existing DR infrastructure, so there should not be a lot of overlap in terms of personnel or resources. The move should help EnerNOC expand more quickly in the European markets. The press release on the deal quoted Healy as saying, “we look forward to accelerating the growth of our core businesses and to delivering ever more value to our customers as we lead the transition to a more sustainable, distributed energy future.” So it seems like there is a lot of opportunity for EnerNOC to pursue, but it will likely face integration risks as the deal gets consummated.

I am glad that it appears that EnerNOC’s main business and position in the DR industry will continue. I was worried that a private equity firm might pick it apart and sell the pieces. I look forward to seeing the company expand DR further around the globe.

On the downside, I won’t have any more exciting transactions to write about. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if all of these recent deals pan out in a few years or if the next wave of news will be the large players selling the smaller DER players after unsuccessful integration attempts.