OhmConnect, the Startup That Paid You to Turn Off the Lights, Is Closing. It Didn't Die — It Got Absorbed.

OhmConnect's consumer demand-response platform is winding down after 10 years. But the Oakland company isn't gone — its users are the asset that got rolled into Renew Home, the $100M-backed virtual power plant it merged into in a deal announced in late 2023 and closed in March 2024.

A Bay Area Redditor summed it up this week in four words: "Bummed about OhmConnect shutting down." The company's own help page confirms it, if tersely — "The OhmConnect platform is closing," after what the notice says is 10 years of paying households to cut electricity use when the grid strained.

That's the news. The cap-table reality is that OhmConnect didn't fail so much as get folded up and put away. The deal that set this up was announced in late 2023 and closed in March 2024, when OhmConnect combined with Google's Nest Renew to form Renew Home, a residential virtual power plant. Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, an Alphabet spinout, put in $100 million and took majority ownership, with Google holding a minority stake — per SIP's own account of the closing. The consumer-facing OhmConnect brand kept running for a while. Now it's being wound down into the parent — the users, not the logo, were always the asset.

The wind-down has been quiet and staged. OhmConnect stopped accepting new enrollments in March 2026, and in May 2026 sold its Texas customer book to Direct Energy (ElectricityPlans.com). Its New York demand-response program for Con Edison customers has also ended. There is no press release, no stated final shutdown date, and no closure-time user count — the last public figure was 225,000 customers at the 2023–24 merger, with roughly 190,000 in California.

Renew Home, headquartered at 2201 Broadway in Oakland, is very much alive: it filed demand-response comments with the CPUC as recently as March 16, 2026, and bills itself as the largest US residential VPP, managing 5 million-plus smart thermostats.

What to watch: a formal notice to California users on which CAISO program absorbs them, and whether the OhmConnect legal entity fully dissolves or just goes dark as a brand. The company won't say — and hasn't filed anything that does.

The Dissent

OhmConnect, the Startup That Paid You to Turn Off the Lights, Is Closing. It Didn't Die — It Got Absorbed.

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The Discussion