Renew Home, the Nation's Largest Residential Virtual Power Plant, Formed with Combination of Google's Nest Renew and OhmConnect

Renew Home, North America's largest residential virtual power plant (VPP), has launched out of the combination of Google's Nest Renew service and OhmConnect. The new company brings together millions of customers across the nation, helping to stabilize the grid and to reduce home energy costs.

Renew 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 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). DOE projects that by tripling the scale of VPPs, we could meet 10-20% of peak electricity demand by 2030 – which would avoid $10 billion in grid costs.

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

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, Sense, and others - and will support demand response and VPP programs with more than 100 utilities.

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.