Wannie Park, VP of Utility Solutions at CEIVA Energy, responds to key industry questions prior to joining this year's Smart Energy Summit: Engaging the Consumer in Austin:
What do you think is the most challenging issue for your company as it relates to the residential energy management market?
Weeding through all the different standards and communication technologies as well as reconciling the different passionate agendas of companies backing those different standards. Because of this inherent lack of interoperability, it makes it difficult for system aggregators on the residential side of things to coordinate all devices and technologies.
What are the major challenges that your business must address in 2016? In 2020?
In 2016, for us chaos around standards and interoperability is our biggest issue. In 2020, it’s understanding the utility business model in reference to residential DR, energy efficiency and their role as a value added reseller of services.
What are the major barriers impacting consumer adoption of energy related products and services?
The biggest barrier is a lack of trust that the products and services that are launching today by vendors will be around in a year or two. This is where companies like Nest and Tesla succeed as there is an inherent trust that they will be around and that they will drive increased delightfulness with the product. This makes a lot of products and services feel like science experiments. Additionally, much of the products / innovations happening are early stage and haven’t reached scale resulting in high prices.
What are the biggest opportunities for the smart home industry to work with the electricity industry?
The biggest challenge is giving residential consumers and their associated utilities a compelling enough value proposition that will compel
What impact with smart products and smart home services have on consumer adoption of energy solutions?
In the short run very minimal as the underlying functionality are quite different. In my opinion, consumer facing products and services around the smart products / smart home are successfully primarily around security and to a lesser extent controls (e.g. WeMo, IFTTT, Hue)
Wannie Park will be speaking on the session "Integrating Comprehensive Energy Management Solutions into Smart Home Systems" on Wednesday, February 24 alongside speakers from Haiku Home by Big Ass Solutions, Lowe's, Icontrol Networks, and SmartThings.
For more information on how to get involved in this or future Smart Energy Summit conferences, visit www.ses2016.com.
