ICF acquires Applied Energy group as grid demand spikes

The energy sector is one where ICF looks for common themes and trend lines across its government and highly regulated verticals, especially with how the company can bring forward its advisory and technology-enabled services.

By acquiring Applied Energy Group from Ameresco, ICF is looking to do more of the work it and AEG have worked together on for at least a decade. Their collaborations over the past decade have mainly centered around demand-side energy management programs for utility companies and state energy offices.

State and local government agencies also represent a significant client set for AEG, a technology and advisory services provider that employs close to 100 people. Financial terms of the move were not disclosed in the Tuesday release, but AEG posted approximately $30 million in annual revenue during 2024.

In an interview before the transaction’s official announcement, ICF’s chief executive John Wasson cited demand response and flexible load management as areas where the company has worked with energy sector clients before.

As with any purchase, the idea is to gain a greater footing on where the trend lines are going versus where they are today.

“We are seeing a once-in-a-lifetime transition to distributed energy, and as that occurs, these kinds of programs become even more important to the utilities to manage their business and the distributed environment,” Wasson said.

Those programs especially comes into play when considering the energy demands of artificial intelligence, data centers and cloud computing resources.

As Wasson pointed out, the energy industry needs more of “every available solution” to be able to handle the increased workload. Natural gas, coal, nuclear, renewables, hydrogen and carbon capture will all eventually be part of the overall solution.

How utilities and other clients lean on technology to make that future happen is also key. Business intelligence and analytics is a core focus area for AEG in its work with utilities to further enable grid reliability, and in turn affordability.

“I think part of being able to do that is to have your customers engaged and participating in these demand side management programs,” Wasson said.

Back to the idea of commonalities across of ICF’s markets: the company supports the Energy Department’s Better Buildings program that seeks to enable improvements around commercial building practices and energy usage.

“For those clients, we’re certainly able to leverage the high-end data and analytic capabilities we’ve built across these markets,” Wasson said. “There's definitely overlap, we can use these skills and capabilities on the federal side of that for sure.”

For Ameresco, the clean technology integrator and renewable energy asset developer divested AEG so it could focus more on those core business lines.

Ameresco works to implement energy efficiency and infrastructure upgrades for customers in the government, utility, health care, education, housing, commercial and industrial sectors.

Canaccord Genuity acted as exclusive financial adviser to Ameresco on the transaction with ICF.