KrakenFlex, Octopus Energy’s flexibility platform driving its international expansion into support services, has struck a deal in Canada, likely to run on into three European nations.
Hydro REIN, a division set up last April by Norwegian aluminium cracker and renewables provider Norsk Hydro, will use the Octopus platform at an extrusion mill in North York, Ontario, in a pilot to optimise output from a 0.5 MW Tesla battery. Given success for the pilot starting in April, sites in Germany, Sweden and Spain will be investigated.
KrakenFlex entech enables energy asset owners, traders, suppliers and system operators to monitor and manage their ‘distributed devices’ – solar panels, batteries, EVs – in real-time. Optimising assets’ performance is the takeaway.
KrakenFlex currently controls over 1,300 MW across 1,200 green energy assets worldwide. A further 2,000 MW of renewable energy is due to come online early in 2022. By next year, the platform aims to manage 100,000 devices and 6,000 MW of capacity.
Founded in 2014 as Upside Energy, KrakenFlex was bought by Octopus Energy Group two years ago. It is the integrating ‘brains’ of the supplier’s offering in energy services, allowing management of clients’ devices and matching them to real-time demand and supply.
Working in a cloud configuration, the division constitutes the bridge between physical and financial elements of an energy system, providing clients with a route to monetising distributed energy resources (DERs)
The platform connects with clean energy technologies such as batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps,. This helps to balance the grid and enables customers to capitalise on cheaper, greener power.
Hydro REIN supplies renewable energy at scale to commercial clients.
KrakenFlex’s CEO Devrim Celal welcomed the deal. “(We are ) on a mission to manage and optimise tens of thousands of energy devices in the next few years to match real-time demand with green electricity, helping to create a truly dynamic, flexible grid.
“Hydro REIN has an impressive array of energy resources and we are delighted to partner with them on this initial project in Canada and a further pipeline of work globally. We need more and more industrial businesses to follow Hydro REIN’s path, using energy flexibility to decarbonise their production in increasingly smart ways.”
