Octopus Energy Powerloop

Octopus is aiming to make EVs the obvious choice for drivers by leveraging two of their businesses, OctopusEnergy and Octopus EV.

While working at Play Consulting (product studio in London, UK) I helped the Octopus team to design a system and consumer-facing platform that turned EV cars into batteries on wheels, charging them when it is most affordable.

The system will reduce demand spikes on the grid by feeding back energy from EVs into homes and charging them at the best rates possible, offering EV owners cheap energy and reducing our carbon footprint.

We’re right at the forefront of a pretty incredible alternative use for Electric Vehicles and Octopus, a leader in both UK electric vehicles and green energy markets, approached us to help them build one of the world's first mass domestic vehicle-to-grid projects.

The system now live, reduces demand spikes on the grid by feeding energy from EVs into homes and charging them at the best rates possible, offering EV owners cheap energy and reducing the grids carbon footprint. However, what Octopus needed was a product partner that would drive long term engagement and behaviours for Powerloop users.

For Powerloop to be successful, Octopus needed to drive user behaviours; both plugging in to the system consistently and remaining plugged in. Working closely with the Octopus team, I designed an app based platform leveraging data feedback and gamified mechanics with a clear goal to complete the ‘power loop’. We fed data back to owerloop users on their positive impacts on decreasing emissions and utilised habit setting mechanics to entrench the use of the V2G programme.

Powerloop was much more than simply the commissioning and making of a product.

We brought into being a fundamentally disruptive and ingenious idea that will make a colossal contribution to making Britain carbon neutral. And to achieve this, in strong contrast to the traditional client supplier model, Powerloop required a very different relationship.

The success of the project was reliant on the cross pollination of the Octopus and Play ways of working with absolute transparency and collaboration when problem solving.