GridPoint Co-Founder Adrian De Luca Returns as CEO to Power New Battery Product

GridPoint, an energy data management platform for commercial real estate, announced Wednesday that co-founder Adrian De Luca has returned to the company as CEO to lead the rollout of its new storage battery business.

The company said it plans to add on-site storage batteries across its platform of more than 20,000 commercial sites in the United States, targeting a total of 2 gigawatts of distributed storage capacity, which it calls equivalent to the entire generating capacity of the Hoover Dam.

De Luca rejoins the company from I Squared Capital, where he was a principal at the global infrastructure investment firm that has $60 billion in assets under management.

“Our mission for the last 20 years has been very simple: We have been deploying our energy management technology to multi-site retail operators to drive two key business outcomes at the highest level,” said De Luca. “The first one is energy efficiency — using technology to drive down the energy spend for these businesses and to do it reliably across formats, markets and operating models. And the second key business outcome is operational efficiency.”

De Luca’s return and the product rollout come as U.S. electricity demand is on track to set records in 2026 and 2027, according to a July 2026 U.S. Energy Information Administration report. The demand is largely driven by growth in data centers and advanced manufacturing. That pressure is evident in rapidly rising operating costs for businesses managing thousands of restaurants, pharmacies, retail locations and other facilities, as commercial electricity rates rose 42 percent across GridPoint sites over the past five years, the company said.

“My role prior to this was as an investor and a board adviser,” De Luca said of his path to returning to GridPoint. “So I’ve been around the company for a long time, going all the way back to the founding team that I was a part of in late 2003. I’m intimately familiar with the company, the customer base, and the broader market trends. What I had been helping to drive at the board level over the last few years is an analysis on when it would make sense for GridPoint to enter the battery market.

“A small fun fact here is that when we launched the business, batteries were core to our solution. It was a different type of battery — a lead acid and nickel metal hydride. Those were Prius batteries, and they were included in every product that we deployed in the first chapter of the company’s history. So it’s interesting now that after evolving the model quite a bit over the last 20 years, we’re now returning to batteries.”

De Luca said the time is ripe for its new storage batteries, as 18 months ago the market numbers changed dramatically. The input costs of batteries have continued to come down, following a similar pathway to the solar photovoltaic market, and there has been better visibility on the investment tax credit process, including transferability, which makes the structuring of such financings much easier, he said. 

In addition, continued inflation in commercial energy prices is a major factor, as GridPoint’s analysis over the last five years has shown a 40 percent price increase across its locations, reflected in higher energy spend.

“We are offering the batteries on a subscription basis, the same way that we deliver our current energy management solution,” De Luca said. “The hardware, the installation and the energy efficiency solution, are all delivered as a full turnkey subscription. Customers are paying us a monthly fee and they’re saving more energy. They’re seeing a higher amount of energy savings reflected in their bill than they’re paying us for the technology piece, so their value is accretive from day one. Our approach with batteries is to just extend that.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.