Virtual power plant (VPP) platform profile
Everyday Electric, formerly Renew Home: the thermostat VPP goes whole-home
How the largest U.S. residential thermostat fleet works, what its Texas deal with NRG shows, and what changed with the October 2026 rebrand.
VPP Economics has no affiliation with, sponsorship from, or endorsement by any utility, aggregator, platform, or device maker named here.
The short answer
- Renew Home is now Everyday Electric. On October 6, 2026, the company behind Google’s former Nest Renew service and OhmConnect changed its name, bought the connected-car platform Smartcar and launched a “whole-home” virtual power plant (VPP) called Everyday VPP (Utility Dive).
- It runs the largest residential thermostat fleet in U.S. VPPs. The company manages more than 8 million smart thermostats and devices in more than 6 million homes and reports 6+ GW of capacity (Everyday Electric; Reuters).
- Its pitch to utilities is pay for performance. Everyday Electric says it charges no platform or marketing fees and bundles hyper-local dispatch, measurement and verification from smart-meter data, forecasting and load shaping (Utility Dive).
- Thermostats are a different resource from batteries. A thermostat delivers roughly 0.5–1 kW by adjusting cooling for a few hours, with no export and no stored energy, so its capacity is large in total but modest per home.
Where Everyday Electric fits
Highlighted boxes are the roles this company plays; the green bar shows where its programs sit from demand response to an orchestrated VPP.
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From Nest Renew to Everyday Electric
Renew Home was formed in December 2023 when Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners put $100 million into a combination of Google’s Nest Renew service and OhmConnect; Sidewalk became the majority owner and Google kept a minority stake (TechCrunch). It launched in May 2024 with nearly 3 GW of capacity, more than 100 utility programs and a goal of 50 GW by 2030 (Latitude Media).
The October 2026 rebrand marks a shift from thermostat demand response toward whole-home orchestration. Buying Smartcar adds EV integrations, and the Everyday VPP is meant to manage HVAC, EVs, batteries and solar together, with personalized recommendations for each household (Utility Dive). The company says it aims to save customers $5 billion over five years, a gross figure that does not net out program costs (Utility Dive).
Everyday Electric’s reported capacity
Gigawatts (GW), company-reported, with the 2030 goal for context
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Texas: a retailer-run thermostat VPP
The flagship deal is with NRG Energy in Texas. NRG offers Nest and Vivint thermostats with free professional installation to eligible customers of its retail brands, and Renew Home’s software, built with Google Cloud, adjusts them during high-demand periods. The partners target nearly 1 GW by 2035, equal to the peak demand of about 200,000 homes (Renew Home).
NRG raised its 2025 Texas residential VPP target from 20 MW to 150 MW after strong uptake and says it exceeded it, keeping goals of 650 MW by 2030 and 1 GW by 2035 (NRG Energy). Because NRG is the retailer, the household’s reward can be built into the electricity plan rather than paid as a separate incentive.
The 16.8 GW coalition with Sunrun and Tesla
In June 2026, Renew Home, Sunrun and Tesla offered hyperscalers and utilities up to 16.8 GW of flexible capacity: slightly more than 9 GW from thermostats and 7.8 GW from batteries (ESS News). About 60% of the total is tied to Renew Home’s enrolled devices (Heatmap). In California, the three companies are enrolling nearly 21,000 existing devices in PG&E’s SHARE VPP with Rewiring America and Google (PG&E).
The split matters for buyers. Thermostat capacity is available mainly on hot afternoons and fades as homes warm; battery capacity is shorter-lived but can export and respond in any season. A coalition offer blends the two, so accreditation and performance testing need to treat each separately.
What it means for program design
Pay for delivered kW
A pay-for-performance contract with no platform fee moves performance risk to the aggregator, but only if measurement uses a credible baseline.
Plan around 0.5–1 kW per thermostat
Thermostat programs scale by device count, not per-home size. Ask for verified kW per device by hour of the event.
Retailer channels lower acquisition cost
Free installed thermostats bundled with an electricity plan, as in Texas, can enroll homes faster than rebate programs.
Method and caveats
Figures are company-reported or from trade press, checked October 15, 2026. Per-device kW ranges are VPP Economics estimates from thermostat program evaluations, including ecobee’s 0.65 kW average in summer 2025 (ecobee). Everyday Electric was still using some Renew Home web addresses at the time of writing.