Zen Ecosystems is leveraging its smart thermostat to extend the range of residential batteries for home energy savings.
The nearly four-year-old company sells its signature thermostat individually for homes, as well as in enterprise-wide commercial packages. It saves money by shifting a building’s heating and cooling load to optimize for time-based electricity tariffs or demand response events.
Another trendy technology advertises load-shifting and demand response: energy storage. Customers interested in those functions could pick one or the other, but Zen decided to try pitching both. The company’s smart thermostat will be bundled with batteries from Swell Energy, an L.A.-based storage marketplace turned vendor, in what appears to be the first partnership of its kind.
“We’re very aware that storage is hot in the market right now, and our ambition is to be a part of that,” said Zen Ecosystems CEO James McPhail, in an interview on the floor of the DistribuTech conference in San Diego. “Having such a fast ROI, we’re able to partner with companies that don’t have that same luxury to help them expedite their ROI and become an even more attractive solution to their customers.”
The pitch goes something like this: Storage and smart temperature controls enable a customer to exert greater control over energy consumption. Storage is more expensive and has a longer payback time; a customer with a limited budget could simply choose a thermostat and start saving in a matter of months. If a battery already pencils out, however, the inclusion of a Zen thermostat will open up deeper savings for a negligible additional cost.
“With the same amount of storage and the same number of customers, a smart thermostat lets us aggregate a larger grid resource,” the folks at Swell tell GTM. “So the synergy is both customer-facing and grid-facing.”
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