Home energy management company Renew Home announced it has unveiled new, personalized home energy management platform features that help households save, and a new grid solution: Renew Home VPP. Renew Home VPP is a new kind of virtual power plant (VPP) that brings households and energy providers together to help households save energy and earn rewards while offering energy providers cost-effective, reliable grid capacity at scale. New features will roll out now through the end of 2025.
Renew Home partners with home device manufacturers like smart thermostats and water heaters, integrating intelligent energy features directly into device experiences to help households maximize savings while maintaining comfort. With its partnerships and programs, Renew has 3 GW load under control, including legacy demand response (DR) solution, Renew Home DR, which powers Google’s Rush Hour Rewards.
Core to the Renew Home platform are Energy and Rewards Shifts, designed to help households save and earn rewards. Energy Shifts can also align adjustments to when they matter most, shifting energy use to times that are less expensive, cleaner and support grid reliability. Energy and Rewards Shifts are increasingly personalized to account for weather, home performance and personal preferences, and are often so subtle they aren’t noticeable. Consumers can access insights about the way their connected devices are using energy and get regular updates that make it easy to stay informed.
“Electrification, data center growth and more severe weather are driving up energy demand and prices. As grid constraint becomes more frequent, we’re seeing a great desire from households to better manage their energy use and save, while energy providers look for ways to quickly add capacity,” said Ben Brown, Renew Home CEO. “With Renew Home VPP, we are offering a new solution that helps everybody win: when we focus on customer savings, comfort and control, VPP participation skyrockets — ultimately creating a vast grid resource.”
When an energy provider participates in Renew Home VPP, they can unlock new platform features for their customers. Households will be able to link their energy accounts to access:
- More personalized Energy Shifts: automatically integrate their time-of-use (TOU) or demand rate plans to further personalize how Energy Shifts move usage to cheaper times. Check Ins will allow households to provide feedback for an even better personalized experience.
- Rewards Shift: receive an invitation to join Renew Home VPP rewards programs and earn incentives for using less energy when it matters most.
- Savings Tracker: see how their savings add up over time from their devices and Energy Shifts.
- Energy Highlights: see the ways in which Energy and Rewards Shifts were able to help them save, earn money, use cleaner energy, and avoid peak times on the grid.
And, energy providers get access to specific demand management features that enable them to:
- Forecast and plan capacity: view participating and enrolled homes via the Renew Home VPP portal. High participation rates mean more predictable capacity, so energy providers can easily forecast based on time and location.
- Add inputs to our platform: notify Renew Home about grid constraints, price increases and capacity constraints that would benefit from coordinated shifts, and the Renew Home platform can do the rest, helping customers save when it matters most.
- Dispatch locational peak shifts: dispatch Rewards Shift enrolled users with as little as five minutes notice and view the status of events or stop an event in real-time.
- Measure, verify and report: see event performance results and access automated X & Y baselines and randomized control trials (starting in 2026) for even more accurate measurement and verification.
Energy providers can work with Renew Home directly to implement Renew Home VPP beginning Summer 2025.
News item from Renew Home
