Renew Home ramped up its home-energy management platform with personalization to account for weather, home attributes and personal preferences. These shifts, the company says, are often so subtle they aren’t noticeable.
Renew Home partners with home device manufacturers such as smart thermostats and water heaters to integrate smart energy features that will help users lower their costs. The company’s home energy management platform integrates with thermostats, high-load appliances, and other parts of the home to optimize for clean energy and help households save on electrical costs.
Jeff Gleeson, the chief product officer at Renew Home, spoke with pv magazine USA about the natural limits demand-response programs can have, and how the company’s new approach to virtual power plants is based in subtle changes for a powerful impact.
“Obviously, we need more capacity on the grid,” he said. “We’re dealing with the increase of electrification across homes and businesses, increasing demand from data centers, in particular, of course, extreme weather that has a tough intersection with an aging grid.”
He cited a statistic from the Department of Energy, noting the U.S. will need 200 GW of incremental peak capacity by 2030. “It’s a problem where everyone’s going to have to help,” he said, which from a virtual power plant perspective is, “we can probably do a better job of using resources on the grid that we already have more efficiently.”
“Virtual power plants can come in at 60% the net cost of a gas peaker plant or 40% the net cost of a battery,” he said.
(Read: How to fix our nation’s growing electricity supply problem)
Over the last ten years or so, Gleeson said a lot of his team has been leaning into demand response. “That’s still an important part of the puzzle.” Demand-response programs have natural limits, which tend to be on hot summer days and extend for hours, which can get uncomfortable for some people. “As a result,” he said, “the utility partners they’ve worked with in the past tend to use this resource a couple times a year.”
“So it feels like there’s got to be more ways to help people save and earn rewards at home, he said. “And then there’s got to be ways to make this a more flexible and valuable resource.”
To Gleeson, overcoming these challenges is about personalization across subtle moments.
These ideas led the company to add a feature called Energy Shifts, designed to find subtle moments throughout the day where the platform helps people shift their energy use to lower costs. Gleeson said that unlike demand response, where long events can be uncomfortable, “most folks won’t notice these.”
“When you’re doing all these small things, helping everybody but in a very subtle and non-bothersome way, it really adds up to a big impact.”
“There’s big power in small changes,” Gleesen said. “Big power for you as a customer, taking control over your cost, and all it takes is small changes each day, and big power for the grid.”
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