By harnessing the still largely untapped potential of remotely controlled thermostats in homes, tech giant Google LLC and demand response upstart OhmConnect Inc. hope to help avert a repeat of the blackouts experienced in California in August 2020 and Texas in February 2021.

"Those customers perform dramatically better in times of grid stress," OhmConnect CEO Cisco DeVries said in an interview.

The two San Francisco Bay Area companies on April 27 announced an expanded effort to incentivize a critical mass of residential utility customers in California to collectively conserve energy use when demand spikes and power reserves run thin, including through free Nest thermostats, energy savings and payments for those participating in OhmConnect's online service.

The partnership is an important building block for OhmConnect's virtual power plant project known as Resi-Station, a planned 550-MW network of distributed energy resources like smart plug-enabled appliances, thermostats, battery storage systems and electric vehicles. With its current 150 MW of demand response capacity, the project could grow to between 300 MW and 400 MW in summer 2022 by doubling OhmConnect's California customer base to more than 200,000, according to DeVries.

"We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing with Google without Resi-Station," the CEO said. At the same time, its relationship with Google gives OhmConnect an opportunity to scale up Resi-Station with Nest thermostats. "We've all known for some time how valuable those devices are, but we haven't had the capital to get them into people's hands for free. And now we do."

Nest thermostats "can help energy-conscious Californians protect the grid and avoid reliance on fossil fuel-emitting peaker plants," added Jeff Hamel, Google's director of industry partnerships, in a statement. "Nest thermostats helped customers save over 17 billion kWh of energy in 2019. Imagine the impact — for users, for the grid, and for our environment as Nest thermostats across California work with OhmConnect."

Founded in 2013, OhmConnect received a huge boost in December 2020 when Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners LLC, which is backed by Google parent Alphabet Inc., committed to a $100 million investment to expand the company and its Resi-Station.

Targeting Texas

In addition to growing in California, OhmConnect plans to parlay its tightening relationship with Google to debut in Texas, which, like California, is seeking solutions for its recent grid reliability challenges.

"We have gone through the full licensing and approval process in Texas, which we've now received, and we are preparing to launch in Texas," DeVries said. "We've been looking and planning to go into Texas for some time, but after what happened in February I think we realized ... it was time to go."

After opening to Texas customers this year, OhmConnect hopes to be in a position to help support grid reliability in the state by summer 2022.

"Obviously we're focused right now on doing everything we can to support California this summer. But the partnership with Google is ultimately a national partnership that's going to support this all throughout the country."