GridBeyond helps turn energy flexibility into revenue and savings using Azure AI

From its headquarters in Ireland, GridBeyond helps commercial and industrial customers, data centers, renewable developers, generators, and battery storage operators turn energy flexibility into revenue and savings. The company operates across the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Japan, delivering full-lifecycle energy services built on its virtual power plant and energy resource management technology, which connects industrial load, battery storage, and renewable generation to real-time energy markets. Its customers include both front-of-the-meter providers and behind-the-meter industrial sites that can’t afford a moment of downtime.

As energy prices became more volatile and unpredictable, these same customers came under mounting pressure. For around-the-clock operations, such as data centers, even brief spikes could erode margins. At the same time, businesses faced rising scrutiny over operational costs and carbon emissions while still being expected to stay reliable and competitive.

"For many of our large commercial and industrial customers, energy is the single biggest line item in their operational expenses," says Ben Sigrin, Senior Product Manager. "Our solutions help customers get more certainty about their prices and meaningfully reduce them, with very little pain at their end."

A major challenge is insight. Traditional energy management tools lack the predictive intelligence and automation needed to respond to shifting market prices, variable renewable generation, and changing grid demand. This leaves customers with inefficient scheduling, underused assets, and slow, reactive decisions.

The grid itself compounds the difficulty. "Renewables especially are so unpredictable, because they're governed by the weather,” notes Sean McEvoy, US President and Chief Product Officer. “Managing them reliably means being able to predict, sometimes down to the second and the millisecond, what their output is going to be."

GridBeyond set out to solve these problems piece by piece.

Predicting the market before it moves, with Microsoft

The company began by rebuilding its platform on Microsoft Azure, migrating its entire compute estate to standardize on one foundation. Its Azure stack now carries the core workload, enabling GridBeyond to scale securely across nine markets. Azure Virtual Machines provide the on-demand compute it runs on, while Azure SQL Database holds its core data in a fully managed relational database. Azure App Service hosts the customer-facing applications, Azure Storage retains the large volumes of forecasting and telemetry data it generates, and Azure Firewall protects the network perimeter, keeping traffic secure across the estate.

On that foundation, GridBeyond runs its Azure AI apps and agents. Machine-learning models forecast energy prices and solar generation autonomously, refreshing every five minutes and delivering predictions in the final moments before the market closes, so customers know exactly when to buy, store, or draw down power.

Behind those forecasts sits an unusual design. As Sigrin explains: "We have a stable of competing models: different data, different statistical types, retrained at different frequencies. There's a leaderboard, and we've orchestrated it to automatically promote the best-performing model, so the customer always gets the best one available. Through this internal competition, we're never resting on our laurels."

Azure also gave GridBeyond a development ecosystem to keep its product roadmap moving. Across its technical teams, GitHub Copilot is widely used for writing code and automation. The company has gone further by deploying agents across its development cycle, including for code review and architecture planning, to accelerate delivery and free senior staff to concentrate on product strategy. Microsoft 365 Copilot, meanwhile, has been adopted across business and technical teams for everyday work such as capturing meetings and creating action plans.

Consolidating on a single provider was deliberate. "There's a lot of flow-downs from Microsoft in terms of security, reliability, robustness, elasticity around your pricing as well, all the way down to the customer level. So the end-to-end experience with Microsoft is very appealing to us," notes McEvoy. "Instead of just one part of the picture, we have the whole development infrastructure. A lot of our customers are standardizing on Microsoft too, which makes cloud-to-cloud integration far easier."

This alignment runs deeper than technology. GridBeyond sits within the portfolio of Energy Impact Partners (EIP), and Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund has invested in EIP to advance the decarbonization of energy systems, the very transition GridBeyond's platform is designed to drive.

A model that helps customers cut costs and generate revenue

The intelligence doesn’t stop at forecasting, but reaches across the entire energy lifecycle. Using digital twins, GridBeyond builds a live model of each customer's site, then reads operations and market signals together to optimize scheduling without interrupting production, always respecting site-level requirements such as production schedules, machine constraints, and asset limits. Customers with battery storage charge when prices are low and discharge when they peak, cutting costs while easing strain on the wider grid.

The same model opens new ways to earn by stacking revenue across markets. Through demand-side response, industrial users can shift consumption at key moments to help balance the network and create fresh revenue streams, while corporate power purchase agreements let them source renewable energy and prove clean-energy use through a verifiable paper trail.

Tying it all together is one orchestrating layer. "GridBeyond is really the conductor of all these disparate assets, making them collaborate and work together in unison," says Joe O'Brien, Business Development Lead for behind-the-meter storage.

Measurably faster decisions and a cleaner footprint

The payoff is tangible, with GridBeyond's customers typically generating revenue and savings of more than 15% of their energy bills, and the sums scale with the size of the energy site. "We have a large customer whose energy costs $70 million a year," says Sigrin, "and we're proposing very credible changes that could easily save them 7 to 14 million a year. Enormous sums. What we often hear is that these savings help customers fund their own strategic initiatives, which are often environmental goals."

The gains are as much about speed as scale. Work that once took analysts upwards of 20 hours can now be done in minutes, letting teams focus on decisions instead of manual analysis. And by uniting forecasting, optimization, scheduling, and virtual power plant operations under one intelligent platform, GridBeyond has replaced a patchwork of tools with a single source of truth. This distinguishes it from competitors addressing only separate pieces of the puzzle.

"What sets GridBeyond apart is our ability to connect energy assets to the right market opportunity at the right time. Azure gives us the scalable foundation to optimize continuously, helping customers create revenue, reduce costs, and manage volatility without compromising their operations,” concludes McEvoy.

Putting responsible agents in customers' hands

The company's most exciting chapter is still ahead: embedding agents directly into its products, so customers can soon ask an agent to explain recent grid trends and act on them in the moment.

"There are hundreds of data points flowing in every second, something that wasn't possible to handle in the past,” explains Sigrin. “Now, with agents, we can help customers summarize and understand that data in real time, recommend decisions, and move at the velocity of the data."

GridBeyond is also scaling its use of Azure Batch, a service that runs high volumes of compute‑intensive jobs in parallel across pools of virtual machines. This solution makes large‑scale optimization more affordable, while continuing to sharpen forecasting and clean-energy reporting.

All of this puts GridBeyond in step with what Microsoft calls the Frontier Firm, a type of organization built around intelligence on tap and human‑agent teams, where every employee acts as an "agent boss" who directs AI rather than simply using it. GridBeyond already works this way internally, and that same agent-led model is now reaching the customers it serves.

Energy has long been a fixed expense, accepted rather than understood. With the help of Microsoft Azure AI, GridBeyond turns it into a variable that businesses can actively steer as market conditions change.

The result isn't a productivity gain but a fundamentally different way to run a business. One where energy stops being a constraint to manage around and becomes an opportunity to seize.

Discover more about GridBeyond.