Highlights
-
2024-11-16 12:58 I want to tell you about my other award winning podcast called Possible, which I co host with former CEO of DoSomething.org and my chief of staff, Aria Finger.
-
2024-11-16 13:05 And I think the third one is, look as a business person, energy is a $2 trillion sector globally.
-
2024-11-16 13:58 And so we saw the opportunity to build an enterprise software platform for the energy sector that would let energy companies move into the 21st century. I sometimes describe it as like Shopify for utilities because the idea was we could standardize all of the processes and create super slick single data set for the entirety of an operation.
-
2024-11-17 11:19 Because when you see what customers are doing, you discover all the things you could innovate. You might say it’s a bit like Apple versus Microsoft. So both are great companies, companies, but Microsoft, really, its kind of DNA began serving enterprises where you’d have quite a lot of support staff required to run it properly. Whereas Apple started off like how do you make a single device that can scale to billions of users with no customization and support? And we started at that end and yeah, the very first customer was, it was a member of our team and it was a great example of, because we got moving really quickly, we discovered the kind of challenge we were going to face and were able to start making sure we were building for that rather than spending a year and a half theorizing and then discover it was all wrong.
-
2024-11-17 11:19 Right, so on days when it’s windy and sunny, we give customers cheaper energy because the system’s cheaper and we’ll do it for the half hour or the hour or three hours. On days where it’s very sunny. In certain regions, we’ll give people free energy because otherwise the grid is going to turn off the solar farms and we’d rather give it to our customers cheap. If you’ve got an ev, you can Pair it with Octopus. Well, really with Kraken, through Octopus.
-
2024-11-17 11:19 Doing this stuff, they can reduce the cost. We even now work with house builders to build homes where we guarantee no energy bills for 10 years because they’ve got a combination of solar panels, heat pump, battery and smart hot water. And we optimize that and we guarantee no energy bills.
-
2024-11-17 11:20 Reid Hoffman: I mean, even with solar, how can you do that?
-
2024-11-17 11:20 Greg Jackson: The way we do it is it’s all with this insight that the grid price varies. And most places in every country, the grid price varies every half hour, every 15 minutes, whatever, depending on the market you’re in. What we can do here is when it’s sunny, the grid price is usually low. So we put most electricity from your solar panels into your battery.
-
2024-11-17 11:18 And when it’s dark, typically in the early hours of the morning when the lecture is very cheap, so that overall we’re earning from what we put on the grid than it costs us to take it from the grid. And then because we’ve got a smart heat pump in there, most homes will hold heat for maybe three or four hours. Right. So then we’ll heat the home during the period when electricity is cheaper and we’ll use no heating at all during the most expensive time or very little. You’ll still be your target temperature, but the cost to heat the home has dropped dramatically.
-
2024-11-17 11:18 And so we’re able to optimize all of that and a bit more, actually, and then give you, we guarantee no energy bill.
-
2024-11-17 11:18 Reid Hoffman: Right. So you’re able to sell high and give away for free is effectively what you’re doing. Given the challenges of climate change, heat waves, catastrophic Storms, how does that affect this calculus? I mean, there must be days where the energy grid in the UK is strained beyond imagination.
-
2024-11-17 11:18 Reid Hoffman: So one of the many interesting things about your business is Octopus is a big and scaling business on its own, powered in part by Kraken. You are now making Kraken available to Octopus competitors. Right. So it’s not obvious that one would say, I want to actually empower our competitors to use the same software to provide, you know, an equal quality of service. Or competitive quality of service.
-
2024-11-17 11:18 Greg Jackson: It’s a great question, because from the very beginning, our first insight had been we wanted to build a technology platform to disrupt this sector. It was always our kind of business plan that we would license Kraken to other companies. But because Octopus grew very quick, I mean, Octopus was really just the demo client. It just happened to grow very big and become successful in its own right.
-
2024-11-17 11:19 And if you stand back and look at it, what we’re doing now is not rational. We’ve never, as a species, managed to create cheaper power than we can today from solar and wind at the times it’s windy and sunny. And if you start from that perspective, you say, well, how can we use as much power as possible at the times it’s windy and sunny? Because of course, it was not windy and not sunny then. Renewables are far less effective.