Home Energy Management… why the hype??
And mainly for the residential and commercial segment with PV systems?
Let's leave the industrial sector aside as it has already been served very well for several years, and in a very customized way.
Here in Europe, the startups that stood out in this segment were quickly bought by big guys:
* Shell Energy acquired Sonnen
* ABB acquired Aski Energy
* Yello Strom GmbH acquired Energy base…
Other major players, such as Schneider Electric and Honeywell, preferred to develop their own solutions, as did solar innverter manufacturers SMA Solar Technology AG and SolarEdge Technologies.
Of course, there is an interest among prosumers in optimizing their investments in an ecosystem that has become too large and complex to be managed manually:
PV / Inverter / Battery / Heat pump/ EV charger/ Pool pump / Home automation / Weather forecast / Dynamic tariff, etc.
However, despite the great potential, this market is still reasonably small and needs to make the transition from early adopters to early majority market phase.
So, why so much hype in home energy management??
Well, I think that inverter manufacturers and electricity Utilities have realized the risk of becoming simple data pipelines in a very near future. Just as the cellphone manufacturers and mobile service providers did two decades ago.
Today, on a global scale, the hundreds of millions of euros (from third-party applications, software and social networks) that pass daily through the air interface of data networks (4G/5G) leave only crumbs of cents for mobile Utilities and manufacturers of smartphones... and that still hurts them a lot. Having built my career in telecommunications, I experienced this story closely. And of course, the big energy companies don't want to be left out of this huge party.
But being an established company, It's not easy at all to compete against fast and innovative SW startups that are born with this DNA. Zerofy has already shaken this scenario that seemed “behaved”. That is not just a hype. The evolution and competition in the home energy management segment is here to stay.
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