What Octopus announced at its 2026 Energy Tech Summit

Octopus Energy ran its Energy Tech Summit (ETS26) in London this week, the gathering it bills as Europe's biggest energy event and uses to show off what its software and partners are building. The announcements ran across freight, home batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and the standards that let smart devices talk to the grid. The thread tying them together is flexibility: shifting when energy is used and stored to the cheap, clean parts of the day. Here is what landed, and what it means for a household.

Swaptopus: battery-swapping for electric lorries

The headline was a joint venture with the Chinese battery maker CATL, called Swaptopus. Instead of plugging in for hours, an electric truck drives into a hub and has its drained battery swapped for a charged one in minutes, matching the speed of a diesel refuel. The venture says it is built to support more than 300,000 electric trucks and to draw in over £30 billion of private investment, with the first UK hubs opening in 2027 and more than 30 European mega-hubs planned by 2035.

There is a grid angle too. When a swapped battery is sitting in a hub rather than in a truck, it can charge at quiet times and feed power back when demand peaks, so the hubs double as virtual power plants run on Octopus's Kraken software. That is the same logic as a home battery, scaled up to freight depots.

Nook: a home battery for cheap, clean storage

The home-storage announcement was Nook, a battery designed to store energy when prices are low and release it when grid prices spike. The smallest unit is roughly 2 kWh and plugs into a standard wall socket rather than needing a fitted installation, which opens storage up to renters and flat-dwellers who cannot wall-mount a fixed battery. Octopus launched the range across five European markets.

A plug-in unit shifts a slice of daily usage rather than running a house through the evening peak, so its value rests on pairing it with a time-of-use tariff where cheap overnight rates and expensive peak rates are far apart. If you are weighing a full wall-mounted system instead, are home batteries worth it sets out the cases where the numbers work, and the battery calculator models the saving for your home.

A vehicle-to-grid car bundle for under £300 a month

Octopus introduced the Power Pack Bundle, which it called the UK's first vehicle-to-grid (V2G) package, built with the carmaker BYD. For under £300 a month it bundles a leased, V2G-ready BYD Dolphin, a bi-directional charger and a smart tariff that guarantees free home charging, all run on Kraken.

V2G turns the car into home storage: a bi-directional charger lets the car's battery power the house or export to the grid, not just take charge from it. An EV battery dwarfs a home battery, so a car plugged in overnight on cheap power can cover much of the next day's household use. The catch is that it needs both a compatible car and a bi-directional charger, which is why a bundled package is how it reaches most people first.

Heat pumps: the efficiency numbers Octopus put on stage

On heating, Octopus shared figures for its Cosy heat pump. It said 97% of Cosy units come out cheaper to run than the boiler they replaced, based on its own dashboard data, and that the pumps run about 3.8 times more efficient than a gas boiler, with software improvements pushed out as over-the-air updates. These are Octopus's own numbers; the running-cost case for heat pumps in general is laid out in are heat pumps worth it.

Mercury: getting smart devices to follow the grid

Less eye-catching but arguably the point of the whole event was Mercury, Octopus's scheme for certifying that third-party smart devices can be controlled to respond to grid conditions. Octopus said there are now 1.25 million Mercury-certified devices, and named the first connected brands as Zaptech, Easee and Octopus Charge. The aim is that a charger or appliance from any maker can be told to run when power is cheap and clean, which is what makes flexible tariffs work at scale.

Kraken underneath all of it

Each announcement runs on Kraken, the operating system Octopus licenses to other utilities. Kraken now runs more than 70 million contracted accounts across over 40 utilities, including EDF, E.ON Next, Origin Energy and Tokyo Gas. Octopus formally spun it out in December 2025 in a $1 billion raise that valued the platform at $8.65 billion.

What it means for you

None of this changes a household tariff today, and several products are early or sold as bundles. The direction is consistent: Octopus is betting that the saving comes from when you use and store energy, not just from the unit rate. Trucks, home batteries, EVs and heat pumps are all ways to move demand to cheap, clean periods, and the household lever for that is a time-of-use tariff paired with storage. We score Octopus on customer service, sustainability, technology and more on its supplier profile, and the technology area already credits the breadth of this ecosystem. Compare it against every major supplier in the supplier rankings.