Jeremy Warren, Chief Technology Officer of Vivint, provides key insights into the growth of energy and IoT for Parks Associates' Smart Energy Summit:

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

A fragmented national landscape makes it difficult to build a consistent and scalable consumer value proposition and business model. Because different utilities/jurisdictions have their own set of rules, spotty participation, misaligned incentives, it forces us to play in a narrower slice of the potential value domain – just direct consumer savings – than would otherwise be possible.

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

Continuing to innovate the product to better solve real-world problems for mainstream consumers is still our top challenge, but educating the consumer about the product and value proposition is a close second.

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

A few major barriers include:

• Building a better product. The energy savings need to be automatic and smart, rather than requiring people to engage in a complicated setup and/or making them uncomfortable whenever they act outside their normal routine (e.g., work from home).
• Building consumer awareness beyond tech enthusiasts and early adopters to reach the mass market.
• Broadening the value proposition into adjacent areas in a consistent way, such as demand response, demand shifting and the subsidizing of demand reduction.

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

The smart home industry can work to develop better management of residential solar systems with respect to the grid/utilities. It can also work to help implement more dynamic pricing schemes, like time-of-day or demand response, that are difficult for users to deal with manually. Finally, the industry can collaborate to standardize technical interfaces and business models for utility partnerships.

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

Consumer adoption of standalone energy solutions will be more difficult without smart home integration. There’s a limited set of use cases that can deliver enough savings to justify their costs to the consumer without the cost savings that come from either a) being a feature within a larger solution or b) getting the smarts and automation that can be delivered by a more comprehensive solution.

Jeremy Warren spoke on the panel session "Role of Energy Management in Smart Home Solutions" on Wednesday, February 24. Other speakers on the panel included Comcast, Carrier, Rheem, and National Grid.

For more information on how to get involved in Smart Energy Summit, visit www.ses2016.com.

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