The UK-based tech company is on a mission to make every tentacle of the energy system as efficient as possible. (via hothouseclimate)
Renewable energies have long been criticized for their variability. From brewing your morning coffee or tea to binging Netflix at night, demands for residential power tax the grid most in the mornings and evenings. Meanwhile, renewable wind power peaks in the middle of the night, while solar peaks during the brightest hours of the day.
When an electric vehicle owner returns home, she simply inputs when she plans to take her car out the next day into the Intelligent Octopus app. The platform was designed to be a seamless user experience for consumers and utility providers alike. For the first time, a utility representative could actually access and control all aspects of a household’s account, from billing to payments to meter readings, in one place, making the passing of frustrated customers from one department to another a thing of the past.
“We had the insight that you could build software platforms in the 21st century that brought this cheaper, greener power to life faster,” Jackson says. “But when we spoke to energy companies, they’re typically very conservative.” That demo client — Octopus Energy — has been so successful, it recently eclipsed all but one of the U.K.’s major energy providers to become the second-largest energy company in the country. Octopus Energy now directly services 18 percent of the U.K. retail energy market directly. If you count U.K. homes that get their energy from other utility companies running Kraken, the market share goes up to 40 percent.
“In the U.K., when electricity is in quite short supply, the national grid will turn on the most expensive and filthy diesel generators to maintain supply,” says Jackson. “And instead of doing that, what we’ve pioneered is paying customers to move their consumption away from the period when the diesel would have been used. Instead of giving the money to the diesel polluters, we give it to the consumers.
The tactics are not unlike that of Duolingo, an app that has perfected the behavioral nudge to get people hooked on language learning. Across the energy industry, perfecting and scaling these kinds of behavioral nudges will be key to addressing renewable energy’s variability systemwide. Octopus Zero created an algorithmic model that spits out electric appliance recommendations perfectly suited to the size and dimension of a home by combing billions of historic data points of home electric appliances. The end result is home outfitted for optimal energy efficiency and consumption. From there, Kraken’s proprietary software optimizes each appliance’s energy consumption over time.
For instance, when Octopus couldn’t find heat pumps capable of talking to the Kraken software in the way they wanted, Octopus mocked up their own ‘intelligent’ heat pumps to maximize efficiency. Jackson says prototypes are currently in the market and a retail product is expected to go into production within the year.
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