Loading today’s stories
Product1 distinct publisher3 min readPublished
A smart thermostat program pays a household $50 to $150 to join and $25 to $50 a year to stay. The sign-up card usually appears in the manufacturer's app, which is also where the customer goes when the room gets warm.
The Product Desk · Product desk
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
On the first hot afternoon after enrolling, the customer who tapped a button in a thermostat app four months earlier walks into a warm kitchen and opens that same app to find out what happened. According to EnergyHub's Seth Frader-Thompson, the manufacturer's app is how most people find these programs and sign up to begin with [4], and in EV programs the terms and the payment can sit inside the automaker app, where drivers enroll "with a click of a button," says ChargeScape chief executive Joseph Vellone [13]. Whoever owns the sign-up screen owns the explanation screen.
Separate the offer from the transaction. Run the thermostat numbers out five years and the household collects $175 at the low end of EnergyHub's estimate and $400 at the high end [18]. Aggregated, the trimming is real capacity: Frader-Thompson says that across hundreds of thousands or millions of homes the effect is "pretty profound," equivalent to "firing up a power plant" [7]. What MIT Technology Review describes flowing to the household is a bill discount and sometimes a signing bonus [2], and the account does not say what the device maker collects for delivering an enrolled, controllable thermostat [20]. The customer can price their side of the deal and not yours.
Apply the annual band to the estimated 4 million enrolled thermostat households and participant payments come to roughly $100 million to $200 million a year [19]. Treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a market size, because the rate is one executive characterizing typical programs [3], and the programs themselves are not evenly distributed across the country [15].
Two things make this harder to operate than a referral partnership. The first is vocabulary. The utility may never print the phrase "virtual power plant," filing the same product under demand response, peak rewards, managed charging, or bring your own device [11], so a customer who wants to check your in-app offer against the utility's own terms has to guess the search string. The second is eligibility, which can turn on an approved Wi-Fi thermostat model, or on the automaker, charger, utility territory and rate plan, or on battery brand, inverter and installer [12]. Enrollment itself may route through a utility form or a third-party page [14]. One card cannot serve a mixed installed base, and the customers who fail the check will read the dead end as your bug.
Berkeley's Severin Borenstein, who also sits on the board of governors of the California Independent System Operator, says a well-run program can help a utility avoid an expensive grid upgrade or emergency conservation measures [9]. The device maker's exposure sits in the gap between that and the alternative: the utility sets the baseline and the dispatch, and the brand on the app takes the complaint.
So the forcing function before you ship the card. Draw two axes. Across: who holds the setpoint during an event, the utility's dispatch or your product with a guaranteed local override. Down: whether your app tells the customer afterward that an event happened and what it paid. Utility control with no event record is where you have quietly sold the relationship for a fee you do not disclose. Utility control with a visible record makes you a broker who can defend the deal. Override plus record keeps the relationship and costs you dispatch reliability, which is precisely what the aggregator is buying. My recommendation is the override and the record first, and the tradeoff is that visible opt-outs shrink the capacity you can promise, so you get paid less per device. The number to hold yourself to is not sign-ups. It is how many enrolled devices are still enrolled after their third event.
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
A virtual power plant (VPP) is a collection of household devices such as smart thermostats, EV chargers, home batteries and solar panels that a utility can control, usually commanding them to draw less electricity during peak hours, for example by adjusting a thermostat or delaying or slowing EV charging.
In exchange for participation, the utility offers VPP participants a discount on their energy bills and, in some cases, a signing bonus.
Seth Frader-Thompson, CEO and cofounder of EnergyHub, says a smart thermostat VPP program may offer an initial bonus of roughly $50 to $150 plus about $25 to $50 per year, while home battery and EV devices could yield hundreds or thousands of dollars in annual savings.
Frader-Thompson says: "The way most people actually learn about this and sign up is through the manufacturer of the device they have."
As of 2023 there were already more than 500 VPP programs operating in the US alone, and the number has grown since.
An estimated 4 million households with smart thermostats were enrolled in a VPP program as of last year.
Distinct publishers with included, body-backed reporting in this cluster.
1 article · August 28, 2026
Follow any of these and your For You feed starts watching them — no settings page required.
product
Rogue Agents And AI Welfare Are The Same Liability Shield With Two Faces1 distinct publisher
product
Geologic hydrogen's firmest numbers come from mine vents, not reservoirs1 distinct publisher
product
Poland asks Brussels for a €250M Meta fine it has no power to levy1 distinct publisher
security
Washington names industrial-scale distillation, then hands the detection bill to abuse teams1 distinct publisher
Evidence-backed comparisons of source perspectives and observed adoption signals. Read the methodology
Which Builder, Operator, and Investor concerns the observed source mix emphasized—not a truth score.
Evidence, demonstrated adoption, hype gap, incentives, and confidence are assessed independently, each on its own current evidence. How these are measured.
One outlet, one vendor's arithmetic
Every number a reader would act on — $50 to $150 to join, $25 to $50 a year, hundreds or thousands for a battery — comes from the CEO of a company that sells utilities the software to run these programs. The two scale figures, 500-plus programs and 4 million thermostats, arrive with no citation at all. What is solidly evidenced is the mechanics: naming, eligibility, enrollment paths, and the regions where programs actually exist.
Millions enrolled, all of it self-reported
Adoption is real and no longer small: hundreds of programs, an estimated four million thermostats already under utility control, and hyperscalers starting to buy in. But the footprint is lumpy — California, Texas, New England, the mid-Atlantic — and the deeper form of participation, sending battery or EV power back to the grid, is described as rising rather than counted. Ordinary enrollment is thermostat setpoints, not exported electrons.
Slightly ahead of what's shown
This is a restrained piece by category standards — it says outright that most consumer VPPs are less dramatic than the name, and it gives Borenstein room to describe how the model overpays. The stretch is in the framing of value: "firing up a power plant" is a vendor's analogy with no megawatts behind it, and the household upside sounds larger than the $175 to $400 a five-year thermostat participant actually accumulates at the rates quoted.
Enrollment pays the sources
Two of the three industry voices here run companies whose business is signing devices up: EnergyHub sells utilities the platform, ChargeScape does it for EVs. They supply both the dollar figures and the claim that the manufacturer's app is where recruitment happens — a claim that, if acted on, routes more volume through exactly their layer. The academics, Borenstein and Carley, are the unaligned counterweight, and the piece never asks the obvious follow-up: what does the device maker get for putting that card in front of you?
Plausible, unverified
Nothing here looks wrong, and the procedural advice is the kind a reader can check in an afternoon against their own utility's site. Confidence stays middling because a single outlet carries the whole story, the headline counts are undated estimates, and the aggregate payment arithmetic only holds if one vendor's illustrative rate happens to be typical across hundreds of programs — which no one in this reporting says.