Plentify
Organization Details
Plentify enables affordable, reliable and resilient utility systems.
Cheap energy storage is key to fixing electricity grids and enabling more renewables. Many of the world’s homes unknowingly have a large battery installed already: the electric water heater. However most are set to inefficiently guzzle energy when the grid is most strained.
Plentify connects these to the internet, and applies machine learning to slash utility bills and create virtual power plants which help eliminate blackouts. We are starting in South Africa, with plans to expand across Africa and beyond.
Plentify is a multi-award winning cleantech startup, including from the African Entrepreneurship Awards, Columbia University and Echoing Green.
Our team includes the former lead of Google’s Africa energy team who helped fund the largest wind and solar farms on the continent, IBM Research’s former lead energy researcher in Africa, and engineers who have built IoT devices deployed in tens of thousands of African homes.
Impact Story
African cities face the world’s most expensive and unreliable energy services. And these are getting progressively worse as rapid urbanization and climate change place our weak infrastructure under increasing strain. In developed countries, increasing penetration of cheap but intermittent renewable energy is upending utilities’ business models and threatening the reliability of electricity grids.
Plentify aims to address both of these issues by adding intelligence to an appliance that is already in many homes: the electric water heater. By optimizing each water heater around its homes behaviour, we can significantly reduce electricity bills. By timing when it heats based on when electricity on the grid is more abundant, we can help avoid blackouts and utilize renewable energy when it is available.
