Renew Home is rebranding as Everyday Electric

Renew Home, a company that runs programs paying homeowners to let their smart thermostats and home energy devices shift usage to help the power grid, has renamed itself Everyday Electric. These programs, known as virtual power plants or VPPs, work by linking up many homes' devices so utilities can call on them together, like a power plant, instead of building new infrastructure.

Along with the new name, the company is widening what it covers. Instead of just smart thermostats and heating and cooling systems, it now wants to connect electric vehicles, EV chargers, home batteries, and solar panels into one program, called Everyday VPP. To help do this, it bought Smartcar, a platform that lets EV owners link their cars to energy companies. If you already have a smart thermostat, solar, battery storage, or an EV, this kind of program is what lets a utility pay you for letting it adjust how and when those devices draw or send power.

The company says rising utility bills are pushing more households to pay attention to energy use, and it has set a goal of helping customers save more than $5 billion over the next five years, though it hasn't said how that breaks down per household. It's also working with Sunrun and Tesla on a deal to sell 16 gigawatts of combined home energy capacity to large customers like data centers and utilities. That partnership is now part of a new pilot program from PG&E in California called SHARE, which is notable because it's funded directly by Google rather than the utility itself.