Renew Home, now Everyday Electric, buys connected-car platform Smartcar

Renew Home, the residential virtual power plant operator founded in 2024 by leaders from Google Nest's energy team and Google AI Labs, renamed itself Everyday Electric on October 6, 2026 and said it has acquired Smartcar, a connected-vehicle platform that lets drivers connect their cars to energy and mobility companies without additional hardware (release). The company calls itself the largest residential VPP operator in the US. Its acquisition announcement gives no price or other terms; it says Smartcar's platform and team will join Everyday Electric and that services for existing Smartcar customers will continue without interruption.

Smartcar is the EV piece of a wider pitch. The company is introducing Everyday VPP, which it describes as "a personalized virtual power plant that builds upon traditional demand response programs," with direct partnerships with HVAC, EV, EVSE, storage and solar OEMs. Smartcar is there to support customer savings and managed charging in the utility programs Everyday Electric operates. The offer to utilities is about the invoice: the release says energy partners pay based on resource performance rather than platform or marketing fees, and lists hyper-local dispatch, AMI-based measurement and verification, real-time forecasting and load shaping as built in at no additional cost.

The headline capacity mixes two kinds of megawatt. The company says it coordinates 6+ GW of capacity across connected products including smart thermostats, electric vehicles, solar and storage. A footnote on its about page counts batteries at installed rated capacity and HVAC at the one-hour peak load shift potential of connected smart HVAC systems and thermostats across its HVAC partners.

The savings goal reaches past the customer list. Chief Product Officer Jeff Gleeson said the company is working toward helping households save over $5 billion in the next five years, including every household its energy provider partners serve. The about page's footnote says that figure combines avoided system costs that lower rates for households served by those partners with savings and rewards received by enrolled households.

On June 24, 2026, Renew Home, Sunrun and Tesla announced an agreement to deliver more than 16 GW of flexible capacity to hyperscalers and utilities, tracked on our virtual power plants reference page.