Octopus Energy is a British company that’s expanded into several territories since its inception in 2015, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.
It’s the UK’s biggest domestic energy provider, one that’s known for its technology-first approach to billing, supply, and variable pricing. Customers charging their electric vehicles, for example, can time when their car’s plugged in at home with cheaper electricity available overnight or when overall demand is low.
It’s also a big investor in renewable sources of electricity, pumping money into wind and solar. It also installs technology like storage batteries and heat pumps in its customers’ homes.
Underpinning the company’s operations is a web of over 300,000 assets, including smart electricity meters, and monitoring and attenuation devices across its infrastructure. Octopus Energy’s data collation means it can tune its operations in real-time to lower costs, keeping both its investors and customers happy.
Octopus Energy in Berlin
Speaking at last week’s Gitex exhibition in Berlin, the company’s CEO for Germany, Bastian Gierull, argued that it’s customers’ activities and decisions that drive the current energy transition, rather than Octopus, as an electricity provider dictating from where and how energy is derived.
He argued that consumers’ increasing adoption of electric vehicles (one in four of new car sales are EVs, Gierull said) and the popularity of low-carbon technologies are together more powerful than government policies that advocate greener practices.
And it’s greener energies that are cheaper, he said, despite what lobbying groups try to tell us. “If you open your news reader, you’ll see a lot of headlines trying to convince us that the energy revolution has already failed, that it’s too expensive, that it’s not practical, that we need to return back to fossil fuels. […] This is a line that’s being fed to us by the fossil fuel industry and lobby,” he told the audience.
Greener energy has its own challenges, and one good problem to have, yet one that needs solving, is that we have “an enormous amount of free or cheap green energy production. We see containment, these grids are being shut down, the grids cannot handle the available power, or [sometimes], the grid is outright not set up to deal with this.”
What the interconnected devices installed across the Octopus infrastructure allow is a responsiveness to levels of demand for power, and its natural availability. Customers can be told in advance that on a particular day, the grid is under a lot of stress, and rather than take extra capacity from a gas or coal power station, the company “will pay you money if you reduce your energy use. We’ve got 1.6 million people taking part at a time, reducing their energy consumption, and a reduction of 100-200 megawatts of electricity is roughly the equivalent of a gas power plant that is not being turned on.”
The same process can be used in a similar manner when there’s a surfeit of power (high winds or lots of sunshine, for example, where there is renewable generation). “Hey, there’s so much energy in the grid right now, we’ll pay you to take it out or use it, or it’s definitely available for free now. So the next hour, you’re not paying anything to use as much as you can. This is one of our most favourite products. Everyone loves free shit!”
Gierull said that consumers and business users can expect to see more of this type of real-time control of demand, availability, and the grid’s capacity, with smart infrastructure enabling companies to offer their users transient offers, via alerts and messages.
In the UK, as in many places in the world at present, renewable energy sources are subject to criticism because of their seeming imposition on the landscape – solar panels covering traditional farmland, and wind turbines appearing in areas of natural beauty.
Gierull said, “To be honest, all of the kids I know, they love wind turbines. There’s a lot of discussion in politics […] but kids see these majestic beasts above the treetops that are providing clean energy and helping preserve our climate. And the only thing that my daughter would do to improve on the wind turbines, is, she says, ‘dad, why is it grey? That’s so boring. I wish they were coloured!'”
“I think that gives us an understanding of how people at the heart of the energy transition will move everything forward.”
Octopus is positioning itself as the supplier of these types of technology-powered facilities to other energy providers, lending its tech stack to competitors that want to offer their customers the type of user-enacted savings that Octopus is currently trialling and rolling out.
The spectre of venture capital investment in the Octopus Group may suggest that the messages delegates at Gitex Berlin heard were mere rhetoric, and that savings available to choice customers will soon be curtailed by the demands of shareholders. But as the company places itself as the de facto supplier of smart systems in users’ homes and the development of smart grid services, there is a hope at least that consumers will begin to see their energy bills fall, regardless of supplier.
