Nothing’s impossible: Zac Curtis on bringing the connected home to life

Ask Zac Curtis about innovation and he does not start with process, governance or product roadmaps. He starts with possibility. The possibility that energy can become simpler for customers. That low carbon technology can make life easier, not harder. That the connected home can move from a collection of separate devices to one joined-up experience.

 “I just want to do cool stuff.” It is a simple answer to the question of what makes Zac tick, but it says a lot about the way he approaches his work – curious, restless, and always looking for the next idea that might make life easier, smarter, or better for people.

Zac’s route into innovation has been anything but straightforward. His career has taken him from a trainee stockbroker role to sales, training, consultancy and, eventually, energy. But running through every step is a fascination with people – what motivates them, how they change, and how good ideas become things they can actually use. What he called “human-centred thinking and psychology” is an interest in people, something that first emerged during his time in sales and in teaching others. For Zac, this was about helping people to move from one place to another in a way that created value for them and for the business.

His CV includes roles at organisations including McDonald’s, Facebook and Google, helping teams to focus on leadership, culture and capability to make things happen.  For him, the connection between the three is crucial – people need permission to create, organisations need the culture to support it, and only then can great products properly emerge.

That experience eventually led Zac into the energy sector and to E.ON, where he began helping shape a clearer route for new ideas to move from concept to something with the potential of scale. His early work spanned EV propositions and the electrification of heat, before he became involved in what he describes as one of the most exciting propositions E.ON has ever developed – Next Gen Home.

At its simplest, Next Gen Home is a form of Energy as a Service – providing a combination of low carbon technologies such as heat pumps, solar panels, batteries and EV chargers, without the need for payment upfront. Instead, customers pay a fixed monthly price, with E.ON controlling and optimising those assets to help maintain comfort, manage demand and keep costs predictable.

“The beauty of it is the fixed price,” Zac says. “Your bill doesn’t go up or down depending on how much you use. You just pay a fixed price every single month, and we control those low carbon assets to make the best use of them.”

For Zac the real excitement is what comes next. He sees Next Gen Home as the beginning of a much bigger shift – moving beyond the kilowatt hour and towards whole-home comfort. In that future, E.ON is not simply the energy supplier, instead it becomes the trusted provider of the connected home: the organisation that helps manage comfort, efficiency, automation and appliances.

It is an idea that has stayed with him since childhood, after watching the comedy horror film ‘House’. In which supernatural powers bring a home alive so it controls the environment, temperature, and the curtains and doors. The film may only have been fiction, but the concept captured his imagination. “What I took from that, in a positive way, is that at some point, whole-home automation will be upon us,” he says. “It’s virtually there already. You’ve got Alexa, Google Nest and other devices controlling so many things. But why not use something like E.ON Next Gen Home as the basis for that?”

That vision is practical as well as ambitious. A burst pipe, a new fridge, an EV charger, a home battery, heating, lighting, comfort and energy – Zac imagines a future where customers have one trusted point of contact for the connected home.

“The benefit of whole-home automation for customers is ease: simplicity, one point of contact for everything,” he says. “The benefit for E.ON is it drives trust. It drives longer term relationships.”

Next Gen Home is breaking new ground, but it’s not an easy space to work in. Installing multiple technologies in a home over a short period, coordinating specialists, designing propositions and building something people genuinely want all demand detailed thinking and close collaboration.

Zac describes his job as “bringing to life the impossible in the energy industry for the long-term benefit of customers and E.ON alike”.  That is exactly where he likes to be. “I love working at the forward edge of things,” he says.

He calls it “freedom in a gilded cage”, a phrase he means positively. Clear boundaries matter, particularly in a regulated industry where E.ON is answerable to customers and the regulator. But Zac believes innovation also needs pace, testing and the willingness to try more things earlier, learn from them, and either develop or stop them quickly.

Zac also sees huge potential in helping strategically aligned trials land with customers, proving they are desirable, deliverable and commercially sensible. For Next Gen Home, that means moving from the current trial homes towards a broader viable proposition, reaching more customers and testing different combinations of low carbon technologies.

The current scheme includes retrofit homes in Coventry and social housing homes with the Thames Freeport Consortium in Barking and Dagenham. The next stage will explore how the proposition can expand and make the offer relevant to a wider range of households.

For Zac, the attraction is not only the potential scale, but the chance to look back and know he helped start something that became mainstream. “I want to look back on the last couple of years and think, wow, I did that.”

But the bigger story, for him, is still ahead. It is about brilliant energy flexibility for customers, lower bills, lower carbon, and the possibility of E.ON becoming a trusted partner for the whole home – not just the energy that powers it.

Zac’s career may have taken a non-linear path, but the direction now is clear. He wants to create the kind of products people look back on and recognise as the start of something significant. Products that are useful, ambitious and, in his words, cool!

And if his vision is right, the future of energy will not be measured only in kilowatt hours, but in comfort, simplicity, trust and the connected homes we help customers create.

For more from Zac and all things Next Gen Home, listen to his recent BetaTalk podcast to hear why partnership and collaboration are key to the future success of Energy as a Service.