Free Electricity Is Coming To Texas, Thanks To A British Unicorn Backed By Al Gore

Think of it as the gamification of energy consumption — think a combination of Shopify, Robinhood and Uber, he says. And now they’ve launched in the United States, specifically Texas, one of the few states where electric market regulations allow location-specific variable power pricing.

You know the future of the power grid has arrived when your electricity provider wants to pay you to use less of the stuff they are ostensibly selling. That’s effectively the pitch to customers from London’s $16.6 billion (revs) Octopus Energy. “When the grid operators get busy, they pay a fortune to turn on standby generators. If you use less, we will pay you,” says Octopus co-founder and CEO Greg Jackson. He stresses that at the center of the future grid will be a new relationship, based on incentivized nudging.

_{By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff}