Renew Home rebrands as Everyday Electric, launches whole-home virtual power plant

Renew Home is now Everyday Electric, and the smart-thermostat aggregator used the rebrand to launch a whole-home virtual power plant it says can reduce the need for new centralized generation.

Everyday Electric aims to save customers $5 billion over the next five years, CEO Ben Brown told Utility Dive. The Everyday VPP can mitigate costs for all ratepayers, not just the households that host the hardware, Brown said. The company did not say how much capacity it expects to enroll or what participating households get paid.

The Department of Energy in 2023 put broadly defined U.S. virtual power plant capacity at 30 GW to 60 GW and said it could reach 80 GW to 160 GW by 2030, potentially meeting 20% of peak demand. Published estimates vary because the term itself is defined differently.

Utilities and independent power producers plan to bring more than 60 GW of grid-connected gas-fired generation online by 2030, according to Environment America and the Frontier Group.

"It's a pretty unique moment in time," Brown told Utility Dive. "Do we lock ourselves into a high-carbon, high-cost future, or do we find resources to bring down costs for everyone?"

In the second quarter of 2026, about 46% of new residential solar systems had stationary energy storage attached, up from 41% in the same quarter of 2025, according to the American Clean Power Association.

Smart thermostats stay central to the strategy because they are already widespread, Brown said. Parks Associates said last year it expects annual smart thermostat sales of 8.1 million by 2030. In a late 2024 interview, Brown said his company's data showed thermostat owners were more than three times as likely as the general public to buy an EV. They were also significantly more likely to consider heat pumps and home solar or storage, he said.

The aggregation layer—dispatch, customer acquisition, and the software that opts households in—is the asset, not the kilowatts. The same logic applied when Google agreed to fund PG&E's virtual plant: enrolling hardware already in homes is a coordination business, and coordination is what gets paid.