Before participating at Parks Associates' ninth-annual Smart Energy Summit in Austin, Prateek Chakravarty, Head of Worldwide Sales, Bidgely recently provided insight on challenges and opportunities of the energy industry.

What are the barriers to bringing together a broad ecosystem of smart home products that work together as an energy management system?

Hardware is expensive, so investing in multiple smart home devices can be impractical for many consumers. Likewise, with renters constituting ~30% of the population, smart home investment at the household level is limited. This limits the incentive for for major market leaders to take ownership of a single platform for connected devices.

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

With the rise in popularity of smart home solutions, utilities are well positioned due to the wealth of historical usage data collected by smart meters. By disaggregating this smart meter data, utilities have an unprecedented opportunity not only to educate customers about opportunities to save, but also to go to the next level in proactive and personalized engagement. Examples include:

• Understanding discretionary loads in order to model rate tariff optimization on a per-home basis
• Performing smart segmentation of homes based on actual usage and lifestyles (e.g. retirees, stay-at-home parent who does laundry daily during peak periods)
• Targeting based on disaggregated load data to recommend the best smart home solutions for individual homes to optimize programs

How has the smart home created new service opportunities for energy providers?

Energy providers now have the opportunity to be the trusted energy advisor to consumers. With no distinct smart home leader, consumers look to their utilities for personalized recommendations and guidance on their energy usage outside of their smart devices. The smart home movement has also created the opportunity for utilities to address those who are otherwise excluded from the benefits of smart home devices. Low income households, renters, and homeowners currently without smart devices still merit the customized insights afforded from smart devices. Utilities can leverage energy disaggregation technology to still offer enhanced insights/analytics to homes otherwise excluded from smart home benefits.

How will broad adoption of smart home products and services impact energy providers?

The adoption of smart home products challenges utilities to invest more directly in leveraging their existing data to maintain consumer engagement/satisfaction. Utilities can offer a synergistic service to home automation by offering customers personalized, timely insights that empower consumers to better understand their energy usage, both for their smart devices and other major appliances.

Prateek will be participating on the, "Energy Providers: Defining the Role in Home Energy Management," at 2:00 PM, February 20. For more information on the full agenda, visit www.ses2018.com.