Octopus Energy

The secret to Octopus’ rapid growth?

Kraken has enabled Octopus to grow rapidly while maintaining industry-leading customer scores for 7 years running. Today, Octopus is the UK’s most awarded energy company. Kraken's excellent service draws in customers through cutting-edge service tools, a highly efficient operations model, and reliable, innovative products.

Organic customer growth has been supplemented by acquisitions thanks to Kraken’s ability to rapidly and seamlessly onboard customers and scale teams. For example, in 2022 Octopus migrated 1.5 million customers from another supplier, Bulb, in just 6 months.

Kraken drives Octopus’ industry-leading innovation

Due to Kraken's innovative and agile operating system, Octopus continues to grow rapidly. Customer service teams use AI tools to draft more than 50% of digital communications and Octopus’ marketers use the operating system to identify and respond to trends. Procurement teams use the platform to accurately forecast demand, while field teams use Kraken to carry out engineering jobs — with a full view of customer accounts. This innovation has been central to Octopus’ overseas expansion, shaking up markets with new products, streamlining operations, and removing the need for different platforms across 18 different countries.

Octopus’ investment in the entire Kraken ecosystem allows for the creation of holistic solutions that span the energy system. Nowhere is this more visible than Octopus’ array of market-leading smart products:

• Power Pack

• Zero Bills

• Intelligent Octopus

• Saving Sessions

Product Case Study

Intelligent Octopus Go

Kraken powers Intelligent Octopus Go, the UK’s largest smart tariff, designed to unlock cheaper, greener EV charging.

• >160,000 connected electric vehicles

• >24% monthly growth

• >100 million readings per day

• >700 MW of connected power to balance the grid

Over 120,000 customers use Intelligent Octopus Go to charge their electric vehicles. The tariff uses the full power of Kraken's operating system to coordinate assets (such as connected EVs), ensuring that customers only charge at the very cheapest, greenest times, taking pressure off the grid, reducing consumer costs, and increasing grid stability. End users choose when they need their car charged and to what extent.

Kraken accommodates rapid growth — Intelligent Octopus Go grows at a rate of 24% month on month.

Kraken processes over 100 million readings daily for Intelligent Octopus Go, which produces incredibly accurate analysis, including forecasting data. This gives Octopus Energy the ability to sell over 700 MW flexibility through this tariff as part of the UK’s grid balancing mechanism, providing another reliable revenue stream.

Saving Sessions

Octopus Energy, the UK’s largest electricity supplier, has used Kraken to build and operate their world-leading intelligent demand response tool, Saving Sessions. Over Winter 2023-24, Saving Sessions rewarded over a million people for shifting their energy usage around daily demand peaks at short notice.

• 1.5 million participants

• 2GWh of flexibility unlocked over 15 events

• £5.1m savings passed to customers

Kraken helped ensure that Octopus were able to build Saving Sessions over a period of weeks, following several previous smart turn down programmes.

How does Kraken’s tech make saving sessions possible?

• Kraken gives customers seamless registration, authentication and notification of upcoming “sessions” via email and in-app messaging 

• Kraken supports scalability through "Kraken jobs" which allows users to trigger complex automated processes. Octopus uses these jobs to easily initiate event invites to 1m+ customers at short notice, and then reward customers with redeemable loyalty points. 

• Kraken’s data model and APIs ensure that a depth of data (for example: smart meter readings, consumption, preferences, and enrollment) are immediately available in one place, which makes it easy to analyze that data, and create customized, engaging, and immediately responsive customer experiences.

Saving sessions have proved especially valuable to grid operators, who can use the scheme to call on intelligent consumer flexibility rather than expensive power plants when grid demand is high and renewable generation is low. In 2024, savings sessions unlocked demand flexibility equivalent to taking one large gas-peaker power station offline.