Dive Brief:
- Renew Home will begin deploying “homes-first” virtual power plant features this summer that can leverage more than 3 GW of shiftable load under its control, the home energy management company said Monday.
- The Renew Home VPP will automatically integrate participating energy providers’ time-of-use or demand rate plans and solicit household feedback to improve personalization for customers, Renew Home said.
- Utilities and other energy providers can use the VPP’s digital portal to notify Renew Home of price increases or grid and capacity constraints that would benefit from load shifting, dispatch households enrolled in Renew Home’s Rewards Shift program in as little as five minutes and see event performance results.
Dive Insight:
Renew Home launched in May from the merger of Google Nest Renew and OhmConnect, a home energy management provider. In its announcement last year, it previewed plans to expand its shiftable load from about 3 GW to 50 GW by 2030.
That would provide a significant amount of the 80 GW to 160 GW of VPP capacity the U.S. Department of Energy’s updated VPP Liftoff Report says the country needs to meet at least 10% of peak load in 2030.
“We saw the liftoff report as a major call to action,” Renew Home CEO Ben Brown said in an interview this month. With AI- and electrification-fueled load growth and rising grid maintenance and modernization costs due in part to more frequent extreme weather events, “it is a massive task to keep adding capacity to the grid to support the modern economy we all want to be a part of,” he said.
Virtual power plants offer the fastest, lowest-cost option for new dispatchable capacity, Brown said.
“We are 60% of the cost of a gas peaker plant and 40% of the cost of new utility-scale batteries,” he said.
Renew Home works with more than 100 energy providers across the United States, Brown said. Materials the company provided show more than 450 MW of load under the company’s control in the Northeast, more than 650 MW in the Midwest, more than 750 MW in the West and more than 1,500 MW in the South, which includes Texas.
Renew Home partners with manufacturers of smart home devices like thermostats and water heaters to enable load shifts that are “increasingly personalized to account for weather, home performance and personal preferences, and are often so subtle they aren't noticeable,” it said Monday. About three in four Nest customers opt into its daily Energy Shift program when they set up their devices, it said.
“It’s important that we make adoption incredibly easy, minimizing friction in the enrollment experience,” Brown said.
High customer participation rates mean more predictable capacity, improving energy providers’ load-forecasting capabilities at given times and locations, Renew Home said Monday.
Energy providers can work with Renew Home to deploy its VPP beginning this summer. Renew Home will also continue to support and expand Rush Hour Rewards, a thermostat-based demand response program with more than 1.5 million households enrolled, it said.
Renew Home’s “customer-centric” approach felt like an outlier when Nest Renew began pursuing it a few years ago, Brown said. “It was very different from the [status quo] at the time, which was direct utility control over your [air conditioner] compressor,” he said. “We realized that was never going to scale to the level you needed.”
From a regulatory standpoint, Renew Home was also ahead of the curve, and it remains so in some transmission system operator territories, Brown said.
“The idea was, let’s build the resource before the full regulatory gamut is there, proving that it is reliable and should be fully accredited,” he said.
