Having signed up Centrica’s Hive in March, OhmConnect has now become a ‘Works with Nest’ partner, snaring Google’s smart home wing in its bid to become the premier demand-response platform. The start-up is hoping Nest gives it access to many more homes, which it can then aggregate as an incentivized grid response asset. The gist of the offering is that OhmConnect provides a free platform that lets a home sign up, which pays out cash to homes when they let a utility control the home’s energy usage. That remote control trend is called demand-response (DR), or sometimes demand-side-response, and the utilities are very interested in DR because of its potential to save them a lot of cash in procurement costs.…