Distributed energy resources jobs

Distributed Energy Resources Jobs in Renewable Energy

Distributed energy resources (DER) are small generation, storage, and flexible demand assets connected close to where power is used: rooftop and community solar, home and commercial batteries, EV chargers, heat pumps, and controllable building loads. DER work means integrating these assets into the grid and managing them as portfolios rather than one installation at a time. The scale is large. Wood Mackenzie expected the United States to add 217 GW of DER capacity between 2024 and 2028, half of it from flexible loads such as EV charging and heat pumps rather than from generation.

What the work involves

The field has a physical side and a software side, and most job titles lean to one of them. On the physical side, engineers design and connect distributed systems, run interconnection studies, and work through the utility rules that decide how much export a feeder can take. On the software side, product managers, software engineers, and data engineers build the platforms that forecast, aggregate, and dispatch thousands of devices, known as DERMS (distributed energy resource management systems) when a utility runs them and as Virtual Power Plants when the aggregated fleet is traded or dispatched as one plant.

The commercial layer is just as important. Contracts managers, business developers, and customer success managers show up often in this category, because every DER portfolio rests on agreements with homeowners, building owners, utilities, and market operators. Programme design for Demand Response & Flexibility, meaning the payments and rules that reward customers for shifting load, is a specialism of its own.

Who hires

US companies dominate the listings. EnergyHub in New York builds the platform utilities use to manage smart thermostats, batteries, and EV chargers as flexible capacity, and Uplight works in the same utility software market. Solar Landscape, based in Asbury Park, New Jersey, develops community solar on commercial rooftops, and Scale Microgrids and Ameresco build on-site generation and storage for commercial and public customers. Lunar Energy combines home batteries with software for aggregating them. In Europe, London is the main hub, where energy suppliers such as Fuse Energy hire for products built around customers' own generation and flexibility.

Europe: from rooftops to flexibility

The European market is shifting in a way that matters for careers. Residential installations fell from 28% of new EU solar capacity in 2023 to 14% in 2025, according to SolarPower Europe. Installation jobs in Rooftop Solar have suffered, but the millions of systems already in place still need to be managed, and dynamic tariffs, home batteries, and flexibility markets are turning them into a controllable resource.

That is where DER careers are heading on both sides of the Atlantic: away from selling individual systems and towards orchestrating fleets. The most valued people understand distribution networks and market rules and can also work with the data coming off the devices. Engineers who can explain to a grid operator why an aggregated fleet of batteries is as reliable as a gas peaker, and prove it with telemetry, are few, and the utilities and aggregators competing for them know it.