Prior to the ninth-annual Smart Energy Summit in Austin, Parks Associates sat down with Manoj Kumar, CEO at Powerley, to discuss the future trajectory 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?

Historically, the primary barrier has been the lack of a closed loop between energy and smart home products which has impeded proliferation of home energy management. Additional barriers are high cost of smart products, suboptimal interoperability, inefficient setup processes and finally, lack of clear value proposition for the consumer.

What are the biggest opportunities for the smart home industry to work with the utility industry? How has the smart home created new service opportunities for energy providers? How will energy providers expand the energy monitoring services market?

Smart home providers can leverage the utility to help provide the closed loop with energy and as the channel to proliferate their products. Utilities are the most trusted channel into the home and have the credibility to establish trust and demystify the smart home for consumers.

Energy providers are uniquely positioned to provide the closed loop between energy and the smart home. This connection opens opportunities for energy providers to establish behind the meter services, new service-based revenue streams and a deeper more delightful customer experience.

By closing the loop between energy and every load in the house, energy providers can uniquely enable load level energy efficiency, monitoring and control. This also creates opportunities e.g. peak load management beyond the HVAC to every major load in the house.

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

As smart home products become more widely adopted, energy providers have a prodigious opportunity to go ‘beyond the meter’ to drive greater levels of efficiency and growth by offering new services and products like, energy management, appliance health monitoring, and home automation solutions. This will empower customers to solve energy use problems while securing an avenue of future growth. However, if energy providers opt to innovate in isolation from the smart home, they risk becoming a causality of the disruption – losing their customers and potential profits to channels and brands outside of the energy industry.

Kumar will be part of the Smart Energy Summit session on February 20, "Energy Providers: Defining the Role in Home Energy Management," at 2:00 PM. For more information on the full agenda, visit www.ses2018.com.