Helman has covered the energy sector at Forbes for 20 years, profiling countless entrepreneurs and billionaires such as Aubrey McClendon, Harold Hamm and Ross Perot.
contracts, Octopus Energy has upended electricity consumption abroad. Now it’s spreading its tentacles into Texas , aiming to fix a dysfunctional power grid.ou know the future of the power grid has arrived when your electricity provider wants to pay you to use less of the stuff they are ostensibly selling. That’s effectively the pitch to customers from London’s $16.6 billion Octopus Energy . “When the grid operators get busy, they pay a fortune to turn on standby generators.
“We’re at the end of the time when you just pay your provider a set price for power,” says Michael Lee, president of Octopus’ U.S. based operation. “We’re moving to a grid with dynamic pricing. Where 80-90% of all hours will be free and the rest will be very expensive.” CEO Jackson owns about 5%, worth some $400 million. With 8 million home and business customers, Octopus has quickly become the biggest power provider in the U.K., and the second biggest distributor of natural gas. Jackson insists they’re just getting started.
Octopus Energy is the consumer-facing company. But behind the scenes is a sister company, called Kraken, which is also their name for the A.I.-enabled enterprise software suite with easy-to-use interface and powerful backend analytics that undergirds Octopus’s entire business. Offerings grow significantly more complicated from there. Octopus offers customers the opportunity to reduce their electric bills 15% if they give control over their thermostats and other energy-hogging appliances to an Octopus artificial intelligence system, running on Kraken. The system attempts to predict electricity demand based on weather forecasts. So far, 300,000 customers have signed up.
Sometimes customers like what they see so much that they want to invest. Australia's publicly traded Origin Energy not only licensed Kraken, but has also invested $400 million of equity into Octopus for a 20% stake — making ASE-listed Origin the closest thing to an Octopus tracking stock.
Octopus Energy Greg Jackson Octopus Kraken Electricity Texas
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