Ivo Steklac, Vice President General Manager of RLC Solar Energy Solutions at SunPower Corporation, answers the following industry questions before joining the 2016 Smart Energy Summit in Austin:

What do you think is the most challenging issue for your company as it relates to the residential energy management market?

Making the complex simple for our customers. There is tremendous potential value in integrating energy management with solar which for the initiated includes: rate arbitrage, self-consumption, demand management, fuel switching, and market and/or grid participation. To the uninitiated, or 99% of the non-energy professional consumers, this is beyond their desire to understand, even if it means substantial reductions to their annual energy costs. Thus we need to be able to present these options in an understandable manner that 99% of customers care about, and enable them to personalize and customize their benefits in a way that is significant and meaningful to each consumer.

What are the major challenges that your business must address in 2016? In 2020?

Solar penetration began to take off when 3rd party financing enabled consumers to obtain the benefits without incurring all the costs up-front. Integrated solar and energy management systems employ newer technologies such as storage, and these have yet to achieve the same level of bankability. We are hard at work to overcome this, and in so doing to bring these complete solutions to everyone who can benefit from them.

What are the major barriers impacting consumer adoption of energy-related products and services?

Customer understanding. We have been conditioned to rely on reliable and available energy billed in arrears without any situational knowledge of how much we consume and what that consumption costs. The average consumer barely knows what they pay for their energy, let alone what it costs them to have their home at 75 degrees in January or July, or what the cost could be it if they were so inclined as to want to change it. So energy management systems are solving a problem that for the most part consumers do not appreciate they have.

What are the biggest opportunities for the smart home industry to work with the electricity industry?

Work together rather than in opposition. Our electric grids were built on the premise of supply had to follow consumption (or load). Smart homes can control load in response to customer preference, but also to grid need - as long as there is a customer benefit to serving this need. If utilities provide economic incentive, customers will invest to derive economic benefit.

What impact with smart products and smart home services have on consumer adoption of energy solutions?

Smart products and smart home services provide automation and remote control of things that previously were manual or at the very least local. Think of thermostats 10 years ago versus what is available today. These products enable managed, optimized and orchestrated services that increase consumer comfort as well as decrease customer cost of energy. In other words consumers buy these products because they are cool and convenient and get the cost effective “for free,” driving adoption. 

Ivo Steklac will be speaking on the panel "Solar Industry: Integration, Competition, and Impact on IoT" on Thursday, February 24 at 8:45am. Other speakers confirmed on the panel include Austin Energy, Silver Spring Networks, and Vivint Solar.

For more information on this year's Smart Energy Summit agenda, visit www.ses2016.com.