Clean Energy, Mapped by Function

Most maps of clean energy sort companies into buckets: solar, wind, storage, EVs. Useful for a first glance, less so the closer you look. These buckets tell you what a company is associated with. They do not tell you what the company actually does. Two companies can both live in the “solar” bucket while doing nothing alike: one bolts panels to roofs, the other writes the software that decides when those panels feed the grid.

Worse, many sector views hide the parts of the industry that have grown the most in the last decade. The headline buckets are about hardware: the panels, the turbines, the batteries. But a huge amount of the work, and a lot of the value, has moved into a quieter layer: the software, data, and services that run those assets and settle the money around them. Sector maps barely show that layer, because it does not fit a hardware bucket.

So this map is built on a different axis. Instead of sorting companies by the kind of energy they touch, it sorts the industry by function: the distinct jobs that get electricity made, moved, run, and paid for. Then it places companies on those functions. A company can sit on more than one. Incumbents and startups share the same canvas, because the question is not how old or how funded a company is, it is what job it does.

What counts as a function

A function is a core act. That sounds obvious, but it is the rule that keeps the whole map honest, so it is worth stating plainly: a function is named for the thing it does, not for the outcome it produces, not for the trend it rides, and not for the customer’s experience of it.

That rule does a lot of quiet work. “Customer acquisition” is not a function on this map, because it names a goal, not an act, and every business does it. “End-use” is not a function, because it describes who is on the receiving end, not a job anyone performs. “Decarbonization” is not a function, because it is an outcome that many different acts contribute to. Strip those away and you are left with the real jobs: producing power, moving it, storing it, building the equipment, measuring the flow, balancing the grid, coordinating devices, maintaining hardware, pricing usage, billing for it, verifying performance, and financing and trading the energy itself.

There are twelve of those jobs. They fall into three families.

Physical (what gets built)

This is the hardware layer: the equipment that physically makes, carries, and holds electricity, and the work of putting it in the ground.

Generation. Producing the electricity itself, by converting a source such as sunlight, wind, flowing water, heat, or fuel into electric power. It happens at large plants or in smaller systems close to where the power is used: a utility-scale solar farm, a wind farm, a nuclear or gas plant, or rooftop solar on a single home.

Transmission and distribution. Moving electricity from where it is made to where it is used. Transmission carries it long distances on high-voltage lines; distribution delivers the last stretch on lower-voltage local lines. Together they are the physical network of wires, poles, and substations.

Storage. Holding electricity so it can be released later, most commonly in batteries, but also as pumped hydro, heat, or compressed air. Storage matters because supply and demand rarely line up in time: solar peaks at midday while homes use the most power in the evening.

Installation and EPC. Physically building and connecting the systems. EPC stands for engineering, procurement, and construction: designing a project, sourcing the equipment, preparing the site, wiring it, and switching it on. It also covers converting buildings to run on electricity.

Operations (what gets run)

This is the live layer: the work of running the system once the hardware exists. Much of it is software.

Metering. Measuring how much electricity flows, and exactly when and where. Modern digital meters, known as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), record this continuously instead of once a month.

Grid operations and balancing. Keeping the grid stable moment to moment: constantly matching supply to demand and managing voltage, frequency, and outages so the system does not fail. Operators do this with software such as an advanced distribution management system (ADMS). It is the real-time work of running the network.

DER orchestration. Coordinating many small, scattered energy assets so they act together as one larger resource. A distributed energy resource (DER) is any small asset that can generate, store, or shift power: a home battery, an EV charger, a smart thermostat, rooftop solar. Software called a DERMS (distributed energy resource management system) runs these devices as a single coordinated fleet, whether to steady the local grid or to be sold into a market. This is one of the fastest-growing jobs on the map, and one the sector view never shows.

Monitoring and maintenance. Watching equipment after it is installed to catch problems and fix them. The industry calls this operations and maintenance (O&M): spotting when a panel, inverter, or battery is underperforming or has failed, and sending someone to repair it so it keeps producing.

Commercial (price, bill, fund, verify)

This is the money layer: turning energy into prices, bills, proof, and capital. It is the least visible part of clean energy and, increasingly, where a lot of the interesting companies live.

Data access and tariff calculation. Two related jobs. Data access is pulling a customer’s energy usage and account data from their utility, often on the customer’s behalf. Tariff calculation is working out what a utility actually charges, since rates can vary by time of day, season, and customer type.

Billing and settlement. Converting the energy a customer used into money. Billing produces the bill and applies any credits earned, for example for rooftop solar sent back to the grid. Settlement is the accounting that reconciles payments between the parties. It also covers retail supply, where a company sells the electricity to the end customer directly.

Measurement and verification (M&V). Measuring how an asset or program actually performed, and verifying it against a claim or a standard. M&V compares results before a change against results after, adjusted for outside factors like weather, to prove the real savings or output. A separate, optional step is bringing in an independent party to certify the work.

Markets and finance. Buying, selling, and financing the power that projects produce: power-purchase agreements (PPAs), marketplaces for those contracts, virtual power plants (VPPs) that monetize fleets, and wholesale electricity markets. Financing the construction of a project, before it produces anything, is an earlier phase and sits outside the map.

Where the map earns its keep

Lay companies across these twelve functions and the picture that a sector map flattens comes back into focus. The hardware families fill in as you would expect. But the density, the overlap, the genuinely new business models, cluster in Operations and Commercial: orchestration, monitoring, data access, billing, verification, markets. That is the layer that runs and monetizes everything the hardware produces, and it is the layer existing maps cover worst. Mapping by function is what makes it visible.

What is deliberately left out

One category that often gets filed under “climate tech” is missing here on purpose: carbon accounting, offset marketplaces, and credit trading. Each of the twelve acts on real power: it makes electricity, moves it, stores it, runs it, prices it, or settles the money for it. Carbon accounting does none of that. It classifies emissions and moves money around them. That is real work, and it may matter a great deal, but it is a different chain. It sits adjacent to the energy chain without being part of it, so it stays outside the frame.

See the companies

The twelve functions are the structure. The companies are the point. The living map places them function by function: om76.co/clean-energy-companies. It grows as the research does.

Note on EV charging. Electric-vehicle charging is mapped like everything else: by what a company does, not by what it powers. A vehicle is just another load, the same as a home or a factory. So an EV-charging company lands on the same functions as anyone else.

Glossary

• ADMS — advanced distribution management system: software grid operators use to run and stabilize the network in real time.
• AMI — advanced metering infrastructure: digital meters that record electricity use continuously.
• DER — distributed energy resource: a small asset that can generate, store, or shift power (home battery, EV charger, smart thermostat, rooftop solar).
• DERMS — distributed energy resource management system: software that coordinates many DERs as one fleet.
• EPC — engineering, procurement, and construction: designing, sourcing, building, and commissioning a project.
• M&V — measurement and verification: proving an asset or program performed as claimed.
• O&M — operations and maintenance: keeping installed equipment running.
• PPA — power-purchase agreement: a contract to buy the power a project produces.
• VPP — virtual power plant: many distributed assets coordinated to act as a single power plant in a market.