In 2014, Southern California Edison launched one of the most ambitious distributed energy experiments in the United States. The Preferred Resources Pilot was a multi-year effort designed to answer a question that felt radical at the time: could clean, distributed energy resources (solar, storage, efficiency, demand response) replace the need for new gas-fired power plants in densely populated Orange County? It was the right question, but the answer turned out to be complicated.
The pilot proved that aggregating distributed resources to serve grid needs was sound. It also revealed how hard that is to execute in practice, especially when it comes to identifying the right buildings, reaching the right decision-makers, and making the economics work site by site across a complex territory. That difficulty is where our story begins.
In 2015, a small research team in San Francisco (Station A's founding team, then operating inside NRG Energy) began building a geospatial analytics platform called SpaceTag in response to SCE's opportunity. NRG had secured contracts to deploy more than 60 megawatts of flexible clean energy capacity across key parts of SCE's Orange County and Los Angeles grid: a combination of thermal storage, energy efficiency, and demand response for commercial and industrial customers.
The effort taught us something that has shaped everything we've built since. DER deployment is a siting and stakeholder problem. The technology existed. What was missing was the ability to identify, at scale, which buildings in which grid locations should get which resources, and then to make the case to the people who controlled those buildings.
SpaceTag was our response. It combined building-level physical data, energy consumption, grid position, and DER economics to evaluate an entire utility service territory and determine the best clean energy match for every building. The question wasn't "where is it sunny." It was "where does it matter most to put generation, storage, and load flexibility, and what's the right combination for each site."
Station A spun out of NRG in 2018, carrying this geospatial DNA forward. The platform evolved from a customer acquisition engine for a single utility contract into a full marketplace for commercial and industrial clean energy. Today, Station A Portfolios evaluates entire building portfolios, grading each site for solar, storage, and EV charging using geospatial, environmental, financial, and grid data across hundreds or thousands of properties simultaneously. Station A Marketplace connects those qualified opportunities with vetted providers who can execute.
The grid conditions that motivated SCE's Preferred Resources Pilot a decade ago were localized and somewhat unusual. San Onofre had closed. A specific region of Orange County needed a solution. Preferred resources were the experiment. Today, those conditions are everywhere.
U.S. electricity demand is rising for the first time in nearly two decades. Data center load alone is projected to account for nearly half of demand growth through 2030. Interconnection queues now hold over 2,600 GW of proposed generation and storage, more than twice the country's installed capacity, with median wait times stretching to five years. Transformer lead times have doubled. In Northern Virginia, new connections face wait times of up to seven years. Utilities are spending record amounts on transmission and distribution infrastructure, over $84 billion in 2025, and it's still not enough to keep pace.
Knowing exactly where to deploy distributed generation and storage has become operational necessity. Siting is surgical work. Which buildings have the grid headroom? Where are the distribution constraints that behind-the-meter resources can relieve? Which sites deliver the most value to the grid as a whole?
Virtual power plants are scaling fast. North American VPP capacity reached 37.5 GW in 2025. The global market is projected to grow from $6 billion to nearly $40 billion by 2034.
Most of the conversation about VPPs focuses on the orchestration layer: software, dispatch, aggregation, market participation. That work matters. But it assumes someone has already identified the right sites, convinced the property owner to participate, and worked out the building-level economics. That upstream work is what actually limits VPP scale.
The blind spot is real estate. Utilities, grid operators, VPP aggregators, and policymakers assume property owners will naturally want to participate, that the value is obvious, that getting to yes will be easy. None of that is easy. Energy infrastructure decisions in commercial real estate are buried inside complex ownership structures, competing capital priorities, split incentives between landlords and tenants, and general uncertainty about what any of this is worth to the property. The people who control these decisions (asset managers, heads of engineering, sustainability leads, CFOs) aren't waiting for a utility program to knock on their door. They're busy managing buildings.
And yet property owners control the rooftops, parking structures, electrical rooms, and meter points where distributed resources need to go. Their buildings are co-located with demand and grid constraints, the exact locations where behind-the-meter generation and storage can extract real system benefit. What's missing is translation: taking the complex, unstructured data about grid conditions, utility rates, policy, and incentives and making it legible to the property as reduced operating costs, improved NOI, and long-term asset value.
To make this concrete: imagine a utility identifies a constrained distribution feeder where 2 MW of behind-the-meter storage would defer a $10 million substation upgrade. The orchestration layer can dispatch those batteries once they're installed. But who identifies the 15 commercial buildings within 1,000 meters of that feeder with the right electrical infrastructure, load profile, and ownership structure? Who shows each owner that hosting storage will reduce their demand charges, improve their NOI, and qualify for state incentive programs? Who gets those 15 owners to say yes? That's the work that makes or breaks a VPP, and it's the work Station A was built to do.
We didn't set out to build a VPP platform eleven years ago. We set out to answer a simpler question: for a given territory, which buildings should get which clean energy technologies, and what's the aggregate impact? The answer required geospatially aware, building-level, grid-conscious evaluation at portfolio scale, and a way to translate all of that into a story property owners would act on.
That capability is now the thing the grid needs most. As VPPs scale and constraints tighten, the companies, utilities, and aggregators that figure out how to bring real estate to the table as an informed, motivated participant will be the ones that build the virtual power plants of the future.