This past week, Octopus Energy and Enphase announced a new partnership that allows residential customers the opportunity to integrate Enphase home solar and battery solutions into their energy plan to unlock low cost residential energy rates. As part of the agreement, Octopus Energy will be able to flexibly control the customer’s battery to reduce usage when the grid is the most constrained and help save customers hundreds of dollars each year, according to a press release. “Our partnership is just beginning. We look forward to expanding to new markets with world-class products and services to advance a more sustainable future together,” Octopus Energy said.
The proprietary software platform from Octopus Energy manages, controls, and optimizes distributed energy resources. It plans to create a virtual power plant with the Enphase home battery systems and will be bidding these DERs in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) ancillary markets — a first of its kind for these assets.
Octopus Energy can optimize how a customer’s battery interacts with the electric grid through Intelligent Octopus, its smart device retail energy plan, that lets customers access the least expensive retail rates. And of course, during times of a grid outage, the cheapest electricity by far is that being generated by a home’s rooftop solar system.
Like back when we used to daisy-chain computers for a virtual super-computer?
When I managing a double handful of Mac Users’ Macs I had us set up with SETI, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, contributing our meager computing power to a larger academic project
The solution to the grid problem may well be no grid …