About the Mercury Consortium
The Mercury Consortium is a global, vendor-neutral, nonprofit industry organization focused on making energy flexibility work at scale. Flexibility can support resilience, sustainability, and affordability across energy systems worldwide, but only if devices behave consistently across markets and regions, whoever made them.
Mercury is a US-based 501(c)(6) nonprofit, founded by EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute) and Kraken Technologies, led by CEO Dr Andy Molineux. Founded in 2024, it was built to outgrow its founders and represent all aspects of the global flexibility chain: Octopus Energy and E.ON, direct competitors, now sit among its members alongside 30+ utilities, technology providers, manufacturers, regulators, and flexibility providers.
Mercury was created to address a practical challenge: flexible, grid-connected devices are increasingly common, but they do not yet behave consistently across utilities, markets, and regions, even when they use established protocols like OCPP or OpenADR.
The Challenge
Flexible devices, including EV chargers, home batteries, and heat pumps, can respond to grid conditions and take part in energy flexibility programs. In practice, devices often behave differently depending on where they are deployed, how they are integrated, and which systems they connect to. Manufacturers, utilities, and technology providers keep running into the same fragmentation, where:
– Device behavior is defined inconsistently
– Integrations must be repeated across markets
– Flexibility works in some places, but not others
This lack of consistency makes flexibility harder to deploy, more expensive to maintain, and difficult to scale.
What Mercury Does
Mercury provides a neutral, industry-led forum where stakeholders define clear, practical requirements for how flexible, grid-connected devices – Distributed Energy Resources, or DERs – behave for the grid. These requirements underpin the Mercury Certification Mark, which indicates that a device is ready to take part in energy flexibility programs in a consistent, certified way.
Rather than replacing existing protocols, Mercury builds on established, widely used ones such as OCPP, clarifying how a device should behave so that it works the same way with any Mercury-aligned utility or platform. This reduces complexity for manufacturers, improves operational confidence for utilities, and supports broader adoption across markets.
A Global Perspective
Mercury takes a global-first approach. While energy systems differ by region, many of the challenges associated with device behavior and flexibility are shared. Devices are designed, manufactured, and deployed internationally, and fragmented approaches increase cost and complexity across the industry.
By bringing together utilities, manufacturers, technology providers, and public sector stakeholders, Mercury ensures its work reflects real operational needs and can be applied across regions.
Working Together
Mercury operates through member-driven working groups. Participants from across the industry contribute technical expertise, operational insight, and real-world market perspective, helping shape requirements that are practical, testable, and relevant to how devices are actually deployed.
Progress depends on collaboration. Mercury’s work is shaped by the organizations that build, operate, and rely on flexible devices, with the goal of creating a more consistent foundation for energy flexibility. Through this collective effort, Mercury supports a more resilient and adaptable energy system, one that can evolve through global collaboration rather than fragmented, market-by-market solutions.