The Octopus battery revolution: how Nook and Swaptopus are smashing the roadblocks to a greener future

Home batteries that don't leave renters behind

Until now, the impressive savings offered by home batteries have been frustratingly out of reach for millions of households — particularly Britain's nine million rental homes.

To solve this, Octopus is becoming the first major British energy supplier to offer its own battery range directly to customers. Nook Cube, our new shoebox-sized, plug-and-play home battery, aims to unlock lower bills for millions of renters by allowing them to store clean electricity when prices are low and use it when they’re high. It will launch next year across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Got a spare plug socket? You can have a Nook.

Lucky enough to own your home and have a spare bit of wall? We've cooked up the Nook Colossus for you. It's a full-sized home battery available in 5kWh or 10kWh models that can be stacked to suit larger homes.

Keeping Europe's electric trucks moving

But the battery revolution isn't just happening at home. Another massive, apparently seemingly roadblock has been the heavy logistics industry.

The maths of road freight is bitterly uncompromising. Time is, quite literally, money.

Although electric trucks have finally reached the point where their running costs are substantially cheaper than internal combustion engines, they have been crippled by one fatal flaw: downtime. It’s hard to persuade a logistics company to park an electric lorry at a charging station for hours while the clock ticks on their delivery window.

Octopus Energy and CATL, a global battery manufacturing giant, have cooked up a pretty incredible solution. Meet Swaptopus.

The swap shop

Swaptopus will be an ultra-fast, automated battery-swapping network spread across Europe.

Here’s the plan: when an electric lorry needs a top-up, it pulls into a Swaptopus mega-hub. The battery is replaced with a fully charged one within minutes and gets back on the road. No time wasted. No margins affected.

And this is far from an untested idea: CATL already has more than 300 battery-swapping stations in China, proving that the concept works — and works well.

An electric truck pulls into a CATL battery-swapping hub

At the energy summit, Oscar Luo, head of overseas investment at CATL, said: “It's a proven technology that can power the car with a 500 kWh battery in just five minutes — that is shorter than feeding diesel into the tank.”

"Electric trucks already beat diesel on running costs, the challenge is keeping them moving," says Greg Jackson, CEO and founder of Octopus Energy Group.

"Battery-swapping changes that. Instead of waiting for hours, trucks can be back on the road in minutes. By combining Octopus’s software and energy expertise with CATL’s world-class battery technology, we’re making clean freight practical at scale across Europe."

During the big announcement, he said: “Part of the magic of this is that trucking companies very often have defined routes. If you've got defined routes, you know where you're going to be swapping your batteries, so we can put battery-swapping stations in.”

Mercury, rising

Greg also found time to make another incredible announcement. Looking back on the Energy Tech Summit in Berlin in 2024, when the Mercury Consortium was announced, he said that the aim was to create the "Bluetooth of energy" by making it easier for smart tech to talk to each other.

Fast forward to now: there are now more than a million Mercury-certified devices across the globe, he announced, adding: "It's making energy cheaper and better for everyone".

Standing room only: every seat in the house was taken during Greg's big announcements

Alex Schoch, our head of flexibility, weighs in on what Mercury has achieved:

"Zaptec, Easee, and our own Octopus Charge are leading the charge, with 12 more incredible clean-tech brands joining the ecosystem soon.

"Scale is everything if we’re going to build a truly flexible, green energy system. This is just the beginning."