During the recent World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy Greg Jackson urged market participants in the renewable energy sector to tap cheap renewable energy sources to stimulate both acceptance and acceptance of clean energy. His speech was part of Irena’s Innovation Day on WFES on January 14, 2025 and put the scene for a subsequent panel discussion on the subject of “digitization to support the 3x renewable objectives.”
Octopus Energy has become the largest energy company in the United Kingdom, with a total of 7.4 million households. As Jackson noted: “We grow quickly in France, Italy, Germany and Spain. We have renewable energy sources in 20 countries. And yet half of the value of our company is the technology that digitizes energy. The secret of growth is that we have used digitization to make renewable energy from a back-end industry hidden from the public in something that the public wants to buy desperately. “
This not only stimulates the use of renewable energy sources, but also helps to prevent the rising recoil against green energy. As Jackson notes: “That is told citizens [green energy] pushes their energy bills up. “A part of the problem are” old market structures “that cannot properly tackle the increase in renewable energy. Instead, what is needed is to bring renewable power plants to “a flexible digitized system” to unleash their full potential and to stop the current limitation crisis. According to Jackson, the UK “GBP spends 20 million a day a day in limitation of the wind.” Fortunately, “a flexible digitized system” is not the world of tomorrow; As the success of Octopus Energy shows, “It’s the world of today” in the words of Jackson.
The journey started with the Octopus Energy team that experimented with variable electricity prices. Fortunately, the experiment showed that households were ready to move a large part of their electricity consumption from the most expensive times. The next step of the company was to offer cheap electricity during windy days. Amazingly enough, 800,000 customers have registered for this offer in just one month. The next step was to create an offer for households in areas with a lot of solar energy on the roof, but a distribution set with insufficient capacity to export that electricity to the transmission set on sunny days. Again, people loved the offer and 80,000 households have registered in that region.
The most recent initiative is Intelligent Octopus, an offer designed for households with an electric vehicle (EV). On “the technology that digitizes the energy”, which for Jackson includes half of the appreciation of the company, together with five billion data points that the company records every day, intelligent Octopus predicts how much battery you need every day. According to Jackson, the outcome is a no-brainer for the end user: three times cheaper than the schedule average for EV chargers and seven times cheaper than feeding a petrol car.
The same return that affects renewable energy sources is also reducing the demand for EVs. For Jackson, this is unacceptable in view of the powerful economy in favor of renewable energy sources. As he says it: “It is absolutely strange that citizens all over the world are starting to leave renewable energy and away from electric vehicles because they think it is a compromise, it is more expensive, it is a downgrade. And they think alone That because we do not give them the benefits of these products and services. “
It is clear that Jackson and Octopus Energy change that perception in the European countries in which they are active. In their home market, the UK has already used the opportunity created by bidirectional EV -Affairs. If you have Octopus Energy optimized when you charge your car and connect to the Wallbox at least fifteen times a month, the company will give you 20,000 km for free. It is only a matter of time until the public perception will switch and the combination of cheap renewable energy and digitization (and related technologies such as AI) promises to accelerate this change in mindset, which must also give a large boost to the use of renewable energy , help we come to the goal of tripling renewable energy sources worldwide by 2030.
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