ZERO-0 ENERGY UNIT

Zero-0 was developed in the U.S. between 2022 and 2024 by Zeroth Systems Inc., a venture-backed company founded by Octave Perrault. This page documents the completed development until the closure of the company in December 2024. The Zero-0 Energy Unit is not currently offered for sale.

A full-scale prototype was built and operated for twelve months beside an occupied house near Princeton, New Jersey. During that period, it delivered 100% of the building’s heating and cooling needs with great efficiency, proving several of the product’s core hypotheses.

The central proposition of the Zero-0 product is to add large, low-cost, clean, local and controllable thermal mass—water—to the energy system rather than to the building. Vernacular architectures and earthships stabilise temperature through large quantities of material, but this mass can also become a counterproductive energy burden for a building’s comfort unless managed properly. The prototype’s goal was to demonstrate that this advantage could be productised, making the thermal mass controllable and adaptive to multiple building and climate applications.

The system was first developed through hundreds of dynamic simulations covering different buildings and climates. Six modeled residential cases show how this strategy can significantly reduce heating and cooling costs over time while increasing operational resilience. However, this 2023 simulation series did not yet include predictive controls, later product refinements or the growing fluctuations in energy prices associated with greater renewable-energy deployment worldwide.

The physical prototype went through several iterations that allowed the development of system-specific operating modes, expanding the heat pump’s performance through thermal stratification in the storage, daily temperature swings and predictive weather data.