Ben Brown explains how millions of smart thermostats form a powerful virtual power plant.
Most kids don’t think much about how buildings are powered or how much energy they waste. But growing up in an old, inefficient apartment building in New York, Ben Brown did.
From an early age he knew he wanted to work on climate solutions and energy efficiency. That interest led him to Google, where he worked on Nest Renew, which allowed Nest thermostat users to adjust their energy usage to times when electricity is cleaner or cheaper. In 2024, Nest Renew merged with the demand response platform OhmConnect to form a new venture, Renew Home. In November, Renew Home released a study showing that small shifts in five million of its smart thermostats across the U.S. can provide utilities with four gigawatts of energy capacity.
This week on With Great Power, Ben Brown dives into how Renew Home conducted its study, what it says about the bigger potential for shifting capacity nationwide, and why he says thermostats are just the beginning when it comes to connecting utilities with available energy capacity inside homes.
Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: Growing up in New York, Ben Brown lived with his mom in an old apartment building with clanky overactive radiators.
Ben Brown: To adjust the temperature in the winter meant usually opening the window, get it nice and cool, and then you let it heat up to a sauna/steam room temperature, and then do the same thing over and over again.
Brad Langley: The summers unfortunately weren't much better without air conditioning. Ben's apartment was incredibly hot at times and opening the windows did not bring much relief. On days when he didn't have school. Ben would often visit construction sites with his mom who was an architect.
Ben Brown: And you'd look at these empty spaces and you think about how a lot of the choices we make around how we design the infrastructure around us really does create the framework by which we use resources and energy. So whether it was about the person who built that apartment building, the people that build our houses and the HVAC systems that go into our houses or the electricity systems, the power houses, you realize the inertia of these choices we make
Brad Langley: Pretty heady stuff for a kid, but when your mom designs the buildings of the future and you're living in an apartment with 19th century heating technology, you tend to think a lot about energy and infrastructure -- or at least Ben did. And that way of thinking stuck with them all the way through college.
Ben Brown: My first job out of college, I worked with a consulting group up in Boston looking at future of energy infrastructure, but also how renewables would create different new challenges on the grid with kind of spikier forms of supply and how you'd have to adjust demand to that.
Brad Langley: This was the mid 2000s, early days for demand response systems. And Constellation Energy was one of Ben's clients at the time. Ben remembers the company asking some of its bigger customers in New England -- businesses like paper mills and ski resorts -- to voluntarily reduce their usage during high demand periods. He says it was all very analog.
Ben Brown: When it came to actually dispatching that, it was pretty much like sending pages or calls directly to the ski lift operator to turn on the lift. So it was kind of very rudimentary at the time.
Brad Langley: After that, Ben pivoted.
Ben Brown: I realized I wanted to work on consumer products that empowered users around the energy transition and decarbonization.
Brad Langley: To do that, he co-founded a startup that developed energy modeling software, but this was in 2007, so that concept was a little ahead of his time.
Ben Brown: There wasn't a lot of widespread access to smart meters yet there wasn't widespread access to technologies in terms of being able to track your decision-making.
Brad Langley: The startup would sell a few years later and Ben turned his focus towards developing better decision-making tools. In 2012, he joined Google as a product manager for its energy and hold platform. Then two years later, Google acquired Nest, the early pioneer in smart thermostats, making it easy for consumers to see their energy use over time.
Ben Brown: The Nest learning thermostat was this kind of amazing product from the get-go where it was, "Hey, we have an ability to give you something that will help drive energy cost savings for you because it will just drive efficiency. You'll not heat or cool your home when you don't need to."
Brad Langley: Over the next decade. As Ben took on different roles at Google, millions of smart thermostats were installed in homes across the country. And in 2021, Google launched Nest Renew, a service designed to help users adjust their energy usage to times when electricity is cleaner or cheaper.
Ben Brown: Looking at rhythms and patterns of homes, creating deep personalization and algorithms to be able to navigate this for customers on their behalf without them having to think about what are the real time costs of electricity on the grid? When does it go up? When does it go down?
Brad Langley: In 2024, Nest Renew merged with a demand response platform OhmConnect, forming a new entity called Renew Home. And Ben became CEO late last year. Renew Home released a study that showed the potential of aggregating the millions of smart thermostats across the US to form virtual power plants and doing so without sacrificing comfort or opening windows.
Ben Brown: If you can find gigawatts of shift of capacity in the system that does not affect user comfort at all and can drive savings to them into the broader population, it's just like a no-brainer. Why wouldn't you do that?
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable and customer centric.
Today my guest is Ben Brown, CEO of Renew Home. We talk about the evolution of smart thermostats and what Renew's research says about the potential of shifting small amounts of energy across large user bases. But first I wanted to know if he sees any messaging tensions between maintaining comfort in the home and addressing the energy affordability crisis.
Ben Brown: Yeah, I mean, my view of it is all of this relies on this kind of idea around customer empowerment, and so I think for folks that are looking to maximize savings, they have different preferences around that. And so they may be, as an example, they don't care as much if the heat drops slightly when they're sleeping. And so I think it's really about customer preferences and just meeting folks where they're at. I actually think there's so much, and that's a lot of what the new stuff we've been working on proves out. The system was never really designed, and smart thermostats and heating cooling and things like EV charging weren't traditionally designed, around the fluctuations that are existing in the background on the grid. So there's so much kind of essentially opportunity that exists to drive value for customers and value for the grid that there's not even really a need to deal with a lot of customer tradeoffs.
Brad Langley: So in late 2025, Renew Home published a white paper about what you call energy shift capacity or ESC because this industry needs another acronym for sure. So let's start with the basics. How are energy shifts different from conventional demand response systems and maybe even before that, what is energy shift capacity?
Ben Brown: When we launched Renew, we had this thesis and a lot of this thesis that came from originally the experience we had with launching Rush Hour Awards 12 years ago, rush hour awards with a background on this was when the Nest learning thermostat came to market. For the most part, demand response programs had existed as kind of these smart HVAC switch programs. If folks remember that, that was the early days of residential demand response, and the challenge with that was that really didn't give customers control. So you'd kind of make a trade off of, "Hey, I'll get some form of rebate or some incentive and that on the hottest days of the year, you can remotely turn off my air conditioner compressor and it doesn't matter how much I turned down my thermostat, it's not going to cool." And that was kind of where demand response was 20, 30 years ago.
And so when Rush Hour Rewards came out, it was trying to convince the energy landscape that, "Hey, if you give customers complete control throughout where in which they can always adjust to the thermostat, but you let them know that there's a speed bump when you do so that hey, if you do this, you're opting out of this event and that has this effect on the grid. There's a trade-off that exists there, but customers have control." And that was a first important step that will make a huge difference in terms of the amount of the population that will adopt to these types of programs over the last decade as we've run that, that has been a tremendously successful demand response program for households across the US. We've enrolled about 1.5 million customers through Rush Hour Rewards and our platform across 150 utilities in the US. It's been a great anchor for DSM programs for utilities, but what we realized within Renew is that there was actually an entire, whole new cohort of the population that wasn't going to opt into a four degree offset on the hottest day of the year, but was actually interested in driving more savings for themselves and being willing to do less while still maintaining comfort.
And that's what we launched when we launched for new, we said, "Hey, we believe there's about 80% of our users that are willing to do that full thing that they care about driving savings for themselves, but they always want to be comfortable. If we can learn those preferences and do that for them, then we can actually have a much larger group of folks engaged." That's what we did when we did that seven years ago. What's been great about that is that we've over time with the Nest population, we've got almost 7 million households now enrolled in Renew. What's great about that is that now you have an existing population of folks we're driving savings for every day. Also, we have this ability to kind of work with them to drive even more benefit to the grid to make sure that you're shifting usage when it's cleanest and cheapest.
And so that resource exists in the background. And so what we started to do this past summer was say, Hey, if we look at that kind of aggregated resource across the US market, we have over five gigawatts of shift to capacity available today. It's a built resource. It's a power plant that is distributed across the entire country. What happens when you start to turn that on? And so that's why we did a pretty large set of experiments and partnership programs with a bunch of utilities across the country to look at what that resource could provide to the grid. And that's where this energy shift capacity white paper came from was around 61 randomized control trials that we ran across the country where in which we showed results like the one in PGM where we had using only about half of the fleet of the renew platform in that area, we were able to show that we could achieve almost 380 megawatts of shiftable to capacity that you could see on the system load curve.
And then we had similar results at different scales across every region of the country. And to me, the reason why that was so important is that I think for a long time we've had this debate in the background around, Hey, if we have the right policies in place and the right incentives and you create these programs that eventually you can get people enrolled, and if you build it, if you create the right environment, then eventually you get the scale that matters. And it's just asking a lot of uncertainty from policymakers and risks from utilities and this and that. And so my view of it and our group view of it as a team had always been, Hey, if we build the resource, it's much easier than to have this conversation, especially in a time of need, like we have now, around, Hey, you're looking to procure another 25 or 50 or a hundred megawatts of capacity. We have this resource available, let's bring it to you. And so I think that what was really important about us publishing all the results from the energy shift capacity results from the summer was saying, Hey, this exists everywhere and we believe that this is the right model going forward where it's customer driven. They've already adopted these technologies, they've already opted in and enrolled to this. They want to drive savings for themselves, and here's an available resource ready to go. All you need to do is help kind of drive the mechanism to do so.
Brad Langley: Can you dig into how you set up those experiments a bit more?
Ben Brown: Yeah. So what's great about randomized controls trials is that RCTs are kind of a gold standard in most industries -- pharmaceutical being a good example of it -- around really proving out the effectiveness of a resource or of a treatment. And so the way RCTs work for us and the way we ran the experiments across the country, and this is exactly also how a lot of energy efficiency programs have been run historically. So this is not new to the energy industry at all, is that you have, especially if you have a large population, which we do, you can essentially have a treatment group that is 95, 98% of the population, and you can have a control group that is withheld from that. So one or 2% of the user base. And if the statistics are significant enough, you can actually see exactly what the control group is doing without any sort of treatment. And the treatment here would be an energy shift. So us moving usage around to get out of a peak period, the control group is not going through that. So you look exactly what the usage would've been for that population. And then you have the treatment group, which is what you're doing in terms of shifting usage out. And so you can look at the delta between that and you can measure exactly what the resource is performing at
Brad Langley: And for the study. So you mentioned PJM, but you guys also analyzed the impacts of energy shifts in the Texas ERCOT region as well as in California. Maybe what was the nationwide view about the flexibility of demand side capacity, but then also were there any kind of more regional specific views that were interesting to you from the findings of the report?
Ben Brown: Yeah, so I mean obviously I think the most interesting thing to me was one, we wanted to look at what's the difference between traditional demand response group and the energy shift capacity group. Because the traditional demand response group, it is a meaningful four degree offset for that population. And that usually provides, let's call it around a kilowatt of shiftable capacity for a group like that a little bit more or less depending on the temperature region. And then there is the energy shift capacity group. And so what we wanted to look at was with a smaller kind of offset, so energy shift capacity group users, because you're specifically not affecting comfort at all, the offsets can be anywhere from 0.5 degrees to two degrees, and it's all done through personalization algorithms to make sure that people are not uncomfortable in those offsets. And so we wanted to see if there would be a meaningful difference between the amount of kilowatts per household that you you'd be getting from that population versus a traditional demand response population.
And so what was really interesting about the results of the study over the summer was actually, yes, of course for one hour resource or two hour resource, there were going to be some deltas between the population, but we found actually there was not as much as we thought we were getting right around 0.84 kilowatt shiftable capacity per household for energy ship customers, which was only a small degradation from what it would be for the full RHR customers. But you remember, what's nice about it is that energy ship capacity customers, that's about 75% of the population, whereas demand response customers usually around 15 to 20% of people that are willing to do that. So I think that's a huge, that ability to show that there's not that much degradation from our traditional demand response customer to an in capacity customer is really, really critical. The second thing was also just looking at the regional variation is obviously it is a somewhat climate dependent resource in terms of how hot or how humid is the climate in different regions?
What does the housing stock look like? So we did experiments across every major climate region and every major ISO RTO. And so that was what was really interesting is that in the southeast obviously we're showing massive impact. So the southeast, when we ran events, you'd see about a 0.94 TW impact for an hour ship capacity event. And obviously as you moved into more temperate regions that would go down, but was really exciting in aggregate is that you were seeing, we were able to see about 320 megawatts of shiftable capacity for a two hour event in PGM across multiple days. And that's amazing. If you can show that that's the equivalent of multiple gas peaker power plants on the PGM line, you can see how valuable that resource is and how much that would actually help provide both costly directly to customers, but actually to the entire region if you're able to provide a much cheaper lower cost resource than traditional gas peakers.
Brad Langley: Yeah, that's a good point. So in terms of, are there any kind of specific examples of, I was thinking about the economics of making distributed capacity more flexible compared to building new infrastructure. Maybe talk us through any key takeaways or additional takeaways in that area.
Ben Brown: Yeah, I mean my sense is is that fundamentally speaking, what's great about virtual power plants is that you're getting more out of the existing system you've already built so that if you think about taking advantage of the existing kind of thermal load of the entire US housing stock, you can essentially provide a resource that is a fraction of the cost compared to building natural gas power plants or other more expensive peak capacity across the country. And so whether you look at the DOE Lift-off report on this, and whether you believe that's 20 or 40% of the cost depending on how you look at it for VPP versus traditional gas peakers, the reality is it's going to be much less significant. You just look at the raw physics of this. You're not building all these new poles and wires, you're not building all these new power plants. And so the benefit of VPPs or distributed power plants is that you're using resources that already exist and you're just using them more intelligently.
Brad Langley: Great. So it's obviously a very in-depth report, chockfull of great data. If we take a step back, who is the white paper targeting and what was your goal in publishing it
Ben Brown: For utilities across the country for policy makers and different regulators across the country? There's always been this question of chicken and egg. Do you need to build a perfect policy or the perfect environment to support more flexible load coming online, or do you need to find ways to enroll the flexible load that exists? And I think the biggest issue has always been do you have enough that it matters yet? And so the reason why we took a pretty unprecedented approach of saying, Hey, we have over five gigawatts of flexible capacity across the country. We can prove that the resource is performing, that people are ready to go, everyone's scrambling to find access to more capacity in every major market across the country. Here's a resource that is pretty cost effective, brings costs down for everyone, but actually the users that are engaged in it, it's empowering them from our cost savings as well. So we should reward this more significantly. To me, that was just kind of like, Hey, if we be out there and be public about this, let's do it. And then for us, yeah, it helps us in terms of we work with a lot of major utilities already on demand response programs. So I guess is the next evolution. This is where we believe the future of flexible load management for households goes. We've seen just a tremendous response from the industry.
Brad Langley: Yeah. So I was going to ask you, so what kind of response have you received? I assume it's largely positive. How are people feeling about it?
Ben Brown: Yeah, I would say there's two things. One is pretty much I don't think there's any single utility partner that we currently work with that is not excited about how they can take on, because essentially if you say, as an example, you have 20 megawatts of demand response capacity today, and then we're saying, Hey, we have an additional 40 megawatts available through energy shift capacity for most of those utils are like, sounds great. How do we figure out a way to do this and reward customer support? So I think that's one, and I think a lot of the kind of policy groups, a lot of state governor's offices, there's a lot of folks out there that have looked at the resource that's available. They're all dealing with trying to go after this energy affordability crisis. So I think that's actually been really helpful and honestly somewhat surprising that there's a lot of folks from the policy landscape that are like, Hey, we really care about empowering customers in this moment.
Exactly right now we care about also being able to interconnect new data centers in our kind of territory because we care about the economic growth associated with that. And so how do we balance all those things? VPPs present a great access to that. And the reality on the VPP side is that we all know we listen to your podcast, everyone talks about the future of VPPs and how powerful they be or how inevitable they are, but the reality is is that a lot of it already exists today, and I think that was really what was important about doing the white paper is that we have a huge amount of resource out there today and we just want to make that available because we think that's an amazing flywheel for taking on other technologies. So a lot of the resource we have is built on smart thermostat technology.
Great. That's a great starting point, but obviously there's a tremendous potential associated with the EVs that are going to get connected bi-directional charging batteries, the same households that are the first adopters of smart thermostat technology, by the way, are the same exact people that are going to adopt EVs that can get solar and storage that are going to get heat pumps. So by building a great trusting and powering relationship with them around this, it becomes an amazing way to kind of provide a pathway forward for them to become even larger participants on a dynamic grid.
Brad Langley: Excellent. So last question for you. We call this show With Great Power, which is nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spiderman quote, with great power comes great responsibility. So Ben, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Ben Brown: You know what, I think my biggest thing has always been trying to learn from failures, trying to be humble. I feel like I've been lucky enough to be part of teams that have worked on pretty incredible products. I've also been part of teams that we have built some pretty crappy products, and so I think for me it's about learning from the failures is super important, and I think we're lucky enough that we have a lot of like-minded folks that work with Renew, that have come from similar backgrounds. We've all kind of taken our thumbs, we've learned from it, and we have staying power. I think it's going to be about the resiliency we need because this is not going to be easy.
Brad Langley: Ben, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate you walking us through the report. Thank you.
Ben Brown: Thanks a lot, Rob. Appreciate it.
Brad Langley: Ben Brown is the CEO of Renew Home with Great Power is produced by GridEx in partnership with Latitude Studios, delivering on our clean energy future is complex. Grid X exists to simplify the journey. Grid X is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid. Mary Catherine O'Connor produced a show. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Markwan composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridEx production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word, you can rate your review with Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Brad Langley.