Why Rhythm Energy turned to Origin’s Kinergy for its Texas VPP ambitions

Energy retailer Rhythm Energy is preparing to enter home battery aggregation in Texas, via a tech stack featuring Origin Energy subsidiary Kinergy from Australia, and interoperability specialist Intertrust, as the company looks to turn scattered residential batteries into a dispatchable asset.

“For 2026, our newest chapter is that we are beginning a battery-focused initiative,” co-founder and chief product officer Matthew Tolliver told ESS News. That will start with “managing behind-the-meter residential and then over time, commercial solutions.” He added that the company will aggregate those solutions, manage them for providing customer resiliency, and then use that storage to bid into the market energy arbitrage as well as ancillary services.

For Rhythm, starting with residential batteries is a natural on-ramp which may scale to larger C&I or utility-scale at some point. But the residential focus helps explain why the company turned to Kinergy. Tolliver said Origin’s experience in Australia stood out because its VPP platform had been built inside an energy company with wholesale market exposure, rather than by a software provider.

“Origin has a technology platform in Australia called Loop, which they have built themselves,” he said. “Loop is now scaled to half a million devices, primarily residential, across multiple asset types, and around 1.5 GW to 2 GW of load.”

That background mattered because, as Tolliver put it, “a lot of the most advanced load flexibility platforms” in the US “were not built by companies whose core money-making engine is interacting in wholesale markets.”

“What it looks like to have a solution that’s useful to a program manager at a large regulated utility is different from what you need to build if you have wholesale traders using that as a hedging tool for their transactions in market,” he said.

“The fact that Origin comes from that background, they like to say they’re energy traders by background, was appealing,” Tolliver added. “They’d find a way to scale this and build this tool into something that truly is at the core of their operations in Australia.”

Australia’s tech to Texas VPPs

Rhythm is now working with Kinergy to adapt that platform for the US. “We are their first US partner to take that platform and bring it to the US market,” Tolliver said, adding “There’s a process of localization.”

That means adjusting not only for market rules, but for the storage technologies common in the US, along with understanding ERCOT vs PJM vs ISO New England and so on. “Localization also means integrating with the right technology distributed assets that are the most dominant in the US,” he added.

The aim, he said, is to “take this distributed set of batteries that we’re in the process of deploying and coordinate them as a single asset that we can dispatch to help manage our wholesale exposure as an energy provider.”

Tolliver also said the market is moving quickly. “I’m now both seeing people aggressively coming after VPP operators and I’m seeing dollars per kilowatt hour being cut by 40%, 30%,” he said.

Still, the harder issue may be access to the batteries themselves and what it costs to control them. “This is a spot where it’s a little bit the Wild West right now … There are OEMs who say, ‘I won’t charge you for that API. It’s baked into the hardware cost,’ which sounds great. But then you worry: if I’m not paying for it, how important is it to you that it works five years from now?” At the other end of the market, he said, “there’s other folks that want to charge you half the model value of the battery just to talk to it.”

That is where the Intertrust part of the tech stack comes in. Using its Trusted Energy Interoperability Alliance (TEIA)-compliant technology, Kinergy’s optimizers can reach OEM devices either through cloud-to-cloud connections or directly at the device level, aiming to reduce the one-off integration work and commercial friction that have slowed broader VPP rollout across mixed fleets.

Hinting at the economic issues along with technical, Tolliver said the market still has to work through business models that give each party enough value to stay engaged. “There’s still a wide range,” he said, and finding “models where everyone has a healthy incentive to do their part to make that chain work” will take time.

Some OEMs and existing connectivity models already leave little room for value creation. “After I pay them, I have to hope to just break even because they’re taking so much of the potential value just by providing the service of connecting the assets.”

Rhythm’s view is that while multiple parts can come together as the solution, retailers may be able to capture and return more of that value by tying storage into the existing customer relationship. “We think that to really unlock the full value of these assets takes understanding of the wholesale market, understanding your customer experience,” Tolliver said. “And to tie that into the package of the energy bill is the right point to do it, not to create some new economic relationship.”