Q&A: CEO of Octopus' Kraken on AI's Use in Energy Management
Digital ecosystems in the energy sector signify a departure from traditional infrastructure models.
By integrating diverse systems and harnessing advanced technologies, these platforms are driving transformative changes across the industry.
They empower utilities and energy firms to adapt rapidly to shifting demands, optimise resource distribution and contribute to a more sustainable energy future.
Originally created by Octopus, Kraken has since become an independent entity, offering sophisticated technology solutions to utilities on a global scale.
Its AI-driven platform facilitates real-time energy load balancing, connects seamlessly with various smart devices and processes billions of data points each day.
This platform enhances grid management efficiency, lowers emissions and promotes smart energy adoption by offering customer incentives—positioning itself as a pioneer in the energy management sector.
Its comprehensive, end-to-end approach fosters greater flexibility and innovation within the utility industry.
In this Q&A, Kraken CEO Amir Orad discusses how the platform is transforming the landscape of energy management.
Please introduce yourself and your role.
I’m Amir Orad, Chief Executive of Kraken. I’ve been with the company since last year and this is the fourth enterprise software company that I'm leading.
I’ve been based in New York for the last 20 years — and right now travelling around like crazy!
What is Kraken and how does it contribute to the energy management space?
Kraken was born when Octopus came about. It’s the technology platform that lets Octopus be what Octopus is — an agile, modern, flexible energy company.
To do that, Octopus looked around and couldn't find technology that is modern enough, smart enough, data-driven enough to do what it needs.
So we set a very ambitious vision to build the entire needs of a utility and an energy company with modern technology.
Somehow — thanks to the work of many smart, passionate people that want to accelerate the energy transition worldwide — Kraken technology came about.
When it started to work — and work well — Octopus gained market share in the UK thanks to innovative customer communication, asset management, billing and the like.
The next big, genius move came a number of years ago — to open up the platform and offer it to other energy companies, just like Amazon gave birth to AWS and then opened up AWS to other people.
Today, Kraken is running as an operationally independent entity — still owned by Octopus but a totally separate business — with its own leadership.
We are providing services to multiple utilities worldwide, servicing more than 50 million households already, including servicing more than half of the UK with Octopus, EDF, E.ON Next and the like, as well as large customers in France, Japan, Australia, Canada, the US and Germany, as well as other countries.
On that journey, we’ve taken what was a new, cutting-edge platform built for Octopus, enhanced it and expanded it based on global needs.
Now we have, by far, the only proven, advanced, modern end-to-end platform for energy companies that deals with all the technology you need to handle the common, back office core needs.
How does Kraken's AI-powered data management system enable utilities to balance and shift energy loads in real-time across various smart devices like EV chargers and heat pumps?
We had to build a number of technologies so that each one is complex, but not enough — you have to have the combination.
To truly optimise the grid, you need to be able to access the devices that can change behaviour, like electric vehicles, charging time, heat pumps, temperature of a house, and somehow access all of them. You need to see and model the entire grid’s set of needs in the future in real time.
To communicate in real time to the human on the other side, you usually use a mobile app and to create business offerings — like, if you have just announced that you can have free electricity in the afternoon, business offerings that cater to those humans and can be actually executed in your system in terms of billing, CRM and customer service.
If you can do all of that well and you can connect the dots, you can really deploy transmission learning models and AI to optimise that problem. We have done that and it is very complex work because it's multidisciplinary innovation today right now, not in the future.
We already digest five billion data points a day of what's happening in our clients, from the battery in your car and the status of charging to weather patterns and what it'll be later on, to the battery capacity of the grid to what the national grid is telling us in terms of pricing and needs all the way to app-based communication.
We are connected today to dozens of different devices, from a Tesla to a BMW to a smart home and manage today more than a gigawatt of electricity just with those smart devices we're connected to — that's like two nuclear power plants.
This lets our customers, in real time, innovate a new business model or business offering. All of that is happening in the platform and, as a result, you can balance demand and load.
Why is that so important? Because during the day we sometimes need to increase demand because we have so much electricity in the grid and during the night we have to shift demand because we don't have enough — or we’ll have to turn on some polluting plant generation plant. We don't want that or to not have enough electricity. So industry experts believe that by shifting load you can actually reduce, by many 10s of precents, the upcoming needs on the grid.
This both has better climate impact and better financial impact for the end users. The energy providers and overall society benefits.
What types of customer incentives have proven most effective in encouraging the adoption of smart energy products and demand response programmes?
You can actually impact demand without a smart device.
You literally can send a message to your customers in advance and say at 2:00pm today we have so much power, enjoy power on us, or it’s half price.
There's many people that would rush home to push the button to turn on the dishwasher because of free electricity — who would say no to that?
The other example is that you can give discounts to people in the community that support the deployment of certain types of distributed generation. You can achieve some value already.
The number one asset is an electric vehicle, because we are all driving moving computers and moving batteries. That's what's driving the good news. You don't need the government subsidy anymore for people to buy an electric car and we're seeing adoption growing in every country, which means we'll have more of them all the time.
There are good incentives, financial incentives and trust in brands or relationships that you can build on — but we have found that with the right technology and personalisation, you get a high uptick with requests to connect and manage charging time.
Can you share some specific examples of how Kraken's technology has helped utilities improve their grid management and reduce emissions?
In addition to flexibility at the retail level, we have flexibility at the grid level — at industrial sites, solar batteries and the like. The more you optimise it, the more you can handle peaks and valleys, lows and highs of the grid and of generation.
When you do that well, that removes the necessity to turn on some less efficient or more polluting resource, because you can find other ways to handle it. It also allows for making more money from renewable assets.
If we can help people make more money from their solar assets and batteries, they will deploy more of them. If we don't let them make more money from them, there'll be less utilisation.
How does Kraken’s approach to modernising utility infrastructure differ from traditional methods? What advantages does it offer in terms of meeting increasing energy demand while reducing environmental impact?
We're the only company that has an end-to-end platform. The value is the ability to see the full picture of what's going — removing the middleman.
As a result of being end-to-end and in the cloud, Kraken is extremely agile. That means you can deploy change.
EDF quoted publicly that with one year with Kraken, they brought about three times the amount of new product offerings than they did in a decade with old, legacy systems.
Customer centricity is a result, innovation is a result — and it all comes from end-to-end, in the cloud, that is updated all the time.
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