The smart system that cancels your electricity bills for 5 years
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In the midst of the energy crisis, following the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the request to customers to reduce consumption during peak hours has generated reimbursements for more than 500,000 families. At the same time, Octopus Energy has always rewarded customers who feed energy into the grid when there is demand. In summary, solar panels, domestic heat pumps, electric cars, wind farms, photovoltaic parks and Kraken are part of a single system based on the production of renewable energy and intelligent distribution. Is there really an energy supply contract (moreover from renewables) that eliminates the cost of bills for five years? At first glance one might smile, but in the London office of Octopus Energy – which landed in Italy just over a year ago – the CEO and founder Greg Jackson confirms everything: “We have a product in collaboration with manufacturers called Octopus Zero Bills. For any detached house we provide for the installation of solar panels, a heat pump and a battery that allow us to supply hot water and heating. In this way we guarantee five years without paying bills and the cost of the systems is lower than in solutions analogous”.
The topic is worthy of interest because the prospect is that a model of this type could also be exported to Italy in the future. Especially since Octopus Energy is already present throughout the peninsula with the sale of energy and heat pumps to domestic customers. But what really matters is that this renewed green tech strategy could also be replicated by other operators since the keystone lies in the organic approach to the problem of energy generation, supply and consumption. In the United Kingdom, the project started last year and in 2023 several families started living in the first Zero Bills houses located in Essex, north-west of Greater London. “We are currently focusing on new homes, working with property developers. But in the future, if homes meet our Zero specifications, including battery storage, solar panels and electric heating, we will use cutting-edge technology to optimize the domestic consumption and the export of energy in exchange for a zero bill”, they assure. The aim though is to potentially make all new homes under construction compliant with the standard as domestic heating is currently responsible for 14% of the UK’s total carbon emissions and the dream is to get that to zero.
“With the UK’s housing stock recently ranked as the worst in Europe, we don’t have time to waste,” the firm points out. “While we can’t change the system overnight, the good news is that we are rapidly approaching cost parity between low-carbon technology and their gas-guzzling counterparts, which means that a a zero-carbon, zero-bills world is far from a distant reality for everyone.” In the suburbs of London, in Slough, a research, experimentation and training center for Zero Bills has been created. Here the systems are studied and developed, including a new, more efficient heat pump. Currently, however, Octopus Energy is already competitive because with government contributions it manages to package an offer of 3,000 pounds (about 3,500 euros), against the average of about 8,000 pounds. And at the same time there are two houses on a 1:1 scale that represent 40% of the type of buildings present in the area and a roof to teach the technicians how to proceed with the installations. Engineers are also working on a charging unit for electric cars that can use the vehicle battery as an accumulator for the distributed electricity grid. In fact, the maximum expression of a future smart grid should include nodes distributed throughout the territory that consume, produce and accumulate with fewer limitations than today. In Italy, a heat pump costs on average around 15,000 euros, from which the 65% eco-bonus, which can be recovered in 10 years, must be deducted; the company is trying to offer it at lower prices.
Power
Renewables, last call: it’s time for Italy to accelerate
by Luca Pagni
The energy company started as a demo for the software
The transition to clean energy has always had a limit – disputed between perception and reality – relating to costs, but the innovation and maturity of some technologies is starting to fade any criticality. The solution proposed by Octopus is based on a sprawling network of elements, just so as not to betray the iconographic value of the logo itself: a cute kawaii-style fuchsia octopus. “My father was in the British army stationed in Germany, I grew up here in England. At 16 I was in Greenpeace, but I’ve always had a passion for information technology. Especially since I believed in SaaS (software-as- service, ed) before it was fashionable”, says Jackson. “In 2015, my partner and I began to offer energy companies our cloud platform, Kraken, and there were two responses: the first is that the world of energy did not need a new technology; the second is that it is a risky industry and that we should have done it with someone else first.”
Following this wandering Octopus Energy was born, as a “demo customer” for Kraken. “The reality is that we started as software developers and then we built an energy company to test our ideas, which today are predictably the heart of our business and are also spreading to other companies,” explains the CEO. For example, EDF and E.ON have become customers of Octopus Energy itself: Kraken liked it. Then somehow everything worked out so well that the company is not only one of the sector with the fastest growth rate ever seen but in three years it has surpassed the threshold of 5.4 million retail customers and boasts 30 million accounts licensed by Kraken (gas and electricity) with 50% in the UK and the rest in 14 other countries. More than a unicorn is a 5 billion dollar Hydra.
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Minister Pichetto Fratin: “In 2030, two thirds of energy will come from renewables. But gas will accompany us until 2050”
by Jaime D’Alessandro
Kraken, the sea monster
Kraken – perhaps a reference (or perhaps not) to the giant squid that squeezes the Black Pearl galleon in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” – is a software platform that manages more than 30 million users using 100% renewable energy alone. It could be considered a real advanced operating system for utilities because it deals with every sector, from generation to supply, and therefore it is as if Octopus had invented a sort of Windows for the industry of the sector, better than those they use normally. The ramifications are impressive, because from the company’s IT behind-the-scenes (back-end) one arrives at the contact points with the customer, eliminating the need for the twenty or so applications that everyone in the industry uses on average to communicate. Curious that in the face of such a profusion of technology, the use of artificial intelligence and above all machine learning, the call centers are totally human in the various locations. “We believe that renewable energy, a clean energy future, is a less expensive energy future. And our job is to build a system that makes that possible, that brings that benefit to households, but also to businesses and economies,” he said. said Jackson in the spring during the South by Southwest festival in Austin. “And so we have to do everything to make it real. Because if you try to do just one part of the system, it doesn’t work.”
Green energy communities
A new piece of this Octopus mosaic is called “Fan Club” and we could roughly imagine it as an English version of the energy communities that are springing up in the EU and in Italy. In practice, the London company allows users to support the construction of local wind farms (it already has hundreds of them) in exchange for an energy discount that can reach 50% on the windiest days. Then the brilliant idea of equipping them with green LEDs: when they light up, the resident customers know they are saving. It is no coincidence that also in southern Italy the construction of two 2 Gigawatt wind farms by 2025 is planned, which will supply 2 million residents. Not only. Owners of British electric vehicles are rewarded with discounts on their bills if they allow Octopus to manage overnight charging while ensuring full autonomy of the vehicle the following morning. It is easy to understand that the supplier plays on the variation of wholesale tariff costs – and here the hand of AI is explicit. The branch of business that deals with the sale and installation of solar panels and domestic batteries follows the same line: the sharing of the energy produced with the grid again follows the fluctuations of the energy market. And this also explains the interest in heat pumps and their sale, which contribute to the management of home heating. Not to mention the strategy of reimbursing customers who reduce consumption during peak hours and rewarding those who feed energy into the grid at times when it is really worth it. In summary, solar panels, domestic heat pumps, electric cars, wind farms, photovoltaic parks and Kraken are part of a single system based on the production of renewable energy and intelligent distribution where optimization becomes a partially shared margin with end customers – basically savings.
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