In Episode 40, host Elisa Wood sits down with Ben Brown, CEO of Renew Home, to explore how millions of ordinary homes are being quietly transformed into virtual power plants (VPPs) — aggregated, AI-coordinated, and capable of delivering what a gas-fired peaker plant once did, at a fraction of the cost and with zero emissions.

From Jimmy Carter's thermostat appeals to today's invisible, personalized energy shifting, Ben and Elisa talk about why the future of grid stability runs directly through your living room.

What you'll learn:

• What a virtual power plant actually is, and why it's different from old-school demand response

• How Renew Home manages nearly 6 gigawatts of flexible load across 7.5 million households

• Why being distributed makes a VPP more valuable than a centralized power plant

• The policy gap holding back the next wave of VPP growth (and which markets are leading)

• How Ben's team achieves an 80% opt-in rate — without customers feeling a thing

• What role EVs, heat pumps, and home batteries will play in the grid of 2035

Ben Brown built the Nest Learning Thermostat and Google Home devices before spinning out Renew Home — now North America's largest residential VPP platform — from Google in 2023. In November 2024, Renew Home announced a partnership with NRG Energy to build a 1-gigawatt AI-powered VPP in Texas.

This episode is for anyone who pays an electric bill, cares about the clean energy transition, or wants to understand how the grid is actually going to keep up with exploding demand from data centers, EVs, and electrification.

Subscribe to the Energy Changemakers newsletter and join the community at energychangemakers.com.