Google’s Nest Renew and OhmConnect have been combined to form Renew Home, the USA’s largest residential virtual power plant.

The new company brings together millions of customers across the nation, helping stabilise the grid and reduce home energy costs.

Renew already controls nearly 3GW of electrical energy use, and is planning to expand to 50GW by 2030, approximately 25% of the total VPP growth recently projected by the US Department of Energy (DoE). The DoE projects that by tripling the scale of VPPs, the USA could meet 10 to 20% of peak electricity demand by 2030, which would avoid $10bn in grid costs (liftoff.energy.gov/vpp).

Backed by a $100m investment from majority owner Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), Renew Home aims to transform residential energy by enabling millions of homes across the country to reduce and shift their energy use collectively.

“The marriage of Nest’s innovative approach to managing energy use in the home with OhmConnect’s customer-focused grid services platform will be transformational,” said Renew Home CEO Ben Brown. “With our industry-leading partners, Renew Home will be able to coordinate the home energy use of millions of customers to help catapult us into a 100% clean energy future.”

Renew Home is already working with the Google Home APIs as a platform provider of integrations to control devices and energy use in millions of homes. Renew Home also integrates with dozens of additional devices and appliances in the home, including LG, Honeywell, SunPower and Sense. It will support demand response and VPP programmes with more than 100 utilities.

“This is a pivotal moment for virtual power plants,” said Alan Machuga, CTO of Rheem. “We are excited to partner with Renew Home to help customers save money and energy, while supporting the grid. As a leading manufacturer of HVAC and water heating products, Rheem uniquely brings both potential for energy savings and energy storage, to which water heaters play a critical role.”

According to the DoE, VPPs are aggregations of distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar with behind-the-meter batteries, electric vehicles and chargers, electric water heaters, smart buildings and their controls, and flexible commercial and industrial loads that can balance electricity demand and supply and provide utility-scale and utility-grade grid services like a traditional power plant.

Renew Home (RenewHome.com), North America’s largest residential VPP, improves residential energy management by enabling residents to lower utility bills while stabilising the energy grid. By harnessing energy reduction from millions of homes into a cohesive virtual power plant, Renew Home impacts the grid. Collaborating with Google Nest (nestrenew.google.com), Rheem, LG, Honeywell, SunPower and Sense along with over 100 utility partnerships, Renew Home says it is spearheading the residential clean energy movement.

For more about OhmConnect, go to www.ohmconnect.com.