Octopus Energy has chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider.
It will use the scalable and secure services to improve customer experience and support the company’s plans for international expansion.
The Kraken platform – Octopus Energy’s insights software – was built entirely on AWS, using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store customer data and AWS Glue to prepare and load that data for analysis.
Following this, Kraken uses Amazon Athena together with Amazon S3 and its Relational Database Service to create and manage its databases, which can handle high throughput and availability.
According to Octopus Energy Group CEO Greg Jackson, using AWS has allowed Kraken to scale up to provide 1.5 million households in the UK with its services. The software has allowed it to bring in smart tariffs, providing “an unbeaten offering” to around 5% of the UK’s households.
“Cloud is a fundamental building block for a low-carbon, decentralised smart grid, and it is our ambition to drive the adoption of renewables and reach 100 million customers worldwide. With AWS we have access to the broadest set of technologies, which let us move quickly to respond to customer and market changes.
“During the ongoing pandemic, we have leveraged AWS’s cloud services to maintain Kraken’s performance and continue to operate as normal during the crisis.”
At any one time, Octopus Energy can offer personalised advice to more than 65,000 customers with 10 customer support staff, thereby reducing customer service costs by more than 50% compared to other energy providers.
Together Kraken and AWS can help understand energy consumption rates down to a household level, by training neural networks on billions of rows of smart meter data, monitoring consumption throughout the day. Using this, it can predict energy use and inform when it buys energy from the wholesale market.
A number of other companies have adopted Kraken to help facilitate their operations, including E.On and Good Energy in the UK, and companies like Origin Energy and Hanwha Corporation in Australia.
Amazon and Octopus Energy have worked together previously, partnering in March 2019 to integrate with Amazon’s Alexa product suite.
“It’s exciting to see Octopus Energy using cloud technology to transform the industry and accelerate the transition to a more sustainable energy future,” said Darren Hardman, VP & General Manager, UK & Ireland at AWS.
“We look forward to continuing to work alongside them as they leverage the breadth and depth of AWS services to accelerate their global expansion and make the green energy transition cheaper and faster.”
