Mercury for utilities

One certified device estate. Every brand your customers buy. Whether you sell tariffs, run networks or balance the grid.

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Consumers are buying EV chargers, home batteries and heat pumps faster than the industry can integrate them. Every brand behaves slightly differently, and the cost of that inconsistency lands on you, whichever part of the utility you sit in.

If you sell energy: launch tariffs that work across brands

The commercial pain arrives at launch. You put out a market-leading EV tariff and customers whose chargers cannot participate go to a competitor whose hardware can. Widening coverage the old way means another bespoke integration for every device brand, a cost that grows with each OEM and eventually caps what your flex products can reach.

Mercury converts per-OEM integration to per-standard. A certified device behaves the same way whichever manufacturer built it, so adding the eleventh brand costs roughly the same as the first. Your addressable base widens with every device certified, and reliable demand response gives you a real lever on balancing and imbalance exposure.

If you run a distribution network: defer reinforcement with flexibility you can trust

A single substation upgrade is often cited at a million pounds or more. Flexibility can defer that spend, but only if the device estate does what it is asked, when it is asked, and fails safely when it cannot. Mercury Class C certifies exactly that behaviour at distribution timescales: 120 second response, defined telemetry, defined fail-safe. It gives you a recognised standard to reference in local flexibility tenders instead of writing and maintaining your own per-vendor requirements, and it supports the flexibility-first position that price controls such as RIIO-ED now reward.

If you operate the system: a deeper pool of fast response

As synchronous generation retires, inertia falls and frequency moves faster. Distributed assets could fill the gap, but individually they cannot be relied on the way a power station can. Certification changes the picture. Class A certifies 1 second response with 0.5% metering accuracy; Class B certifies 15 seconds. Referencing certified device performance in prequalification moves the assurance upstream to the device, so the aggregated pool becomes something you can actually count on. Engagement here rarely means membership. Observer status, or simply referencing the standard, is the realistic relationship.

On independence

A fair question, so here is the direct answer. Mercury's founding group included Octopus Energy and Kraken. It also included E.ON, a direct competitor, precisely because the value of a certification standard is cross-sectional or it is nothing. Devices are tested independently by DEKRA. Governance runs through a Board of Directors and member working groups, and the specification is published openly.

How to engage

Full Membership carries voting rights and working group leadership. The Observer tier is a lower-commitment entry while you prove the case on a first product or constraint. And referencing certified performance in your own procurement requires no membership at all.

Join Mercury. Build the resilient energy future.

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