Octopus Energy selects AWS as cloud provider to power its global expansion plans

Octopus Energy has named Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider, as the UK-based green power supplier press ahead with its plans to to scale its operations across the globe.

Since Octopus Energy’s launch in 2016, the company has signed up 1.5 million households in the UK to its green energy tariffs, who rely on the insights gleaned from its cloud-based Kraken technology platform to access personalised advice on how to reduce their power consumption.

The platform also provides Octopus with visibility of the energy consumption rates across its business by training neural networks using smart meter data that tracks how energy usage rates vary according to the time of day.

This in turn means the platform can make predictions about how usage patterns are likely to change throughout the day, and help the company decide the best time to acquire energy from the wholesale market to keep its customers’ energy costs down.

The platform is built entirely using AWS cloud services, with its Simple Storage Service (S3) used to store customer data, which is then processed by AWS Glue to prepare it for analysis by the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

This setup, in turn, means Octopus Energy can provider personalised advice to more than 65, 000 customer concurrently with the help of 10 staff, which the company claims has paved the way for it trim its  customer support costs by more than 50% compared to its rivals.

The company has set its sights on building a 100 million-strong global customer base, which it is working towards doing by licensing access to the Kraken platform to other energy providers around the world, and by deepening its pre-existing ties with AWS.

So much so, the company credits the fact that Kraken runs on Amazon’s global cloud infrastructure setup as being a key factor in its ability to scale the platform so that it can support 17 million customers worldwide to-date.

“Using AWS we have been able to scale to provide 1.5 million households in the UK, around 5% of UK households, with clean, green energy. We have also enhanced the customer experience by introducing innovative services such as our revolutionary smart tariffs, giving us an unbeaten offering,” said Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy Group.

“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.”      

Darren Hardman, vice-president and general manager of UK and Ireland at AWS, said the company’s technology is playing a pivotal role in helping Octopus grow its business globally, while working towards its goal of making a renewably-powered smart grid accessible to its customers.

“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,” he added.