Prior to the ninth-annual Smart Energy Summit in Austin, Parks Associates sat down with Kevin Klages, Senior Vice President, Mass Markets, Constellation to discuss the future path 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?

The lack of centralized control across devices, for example: individual apps for each device don’t allow for optimization across devices, multiple data transfer protocols across devices (Wi-FI, Zigbee, Z-Wave), and the current state of Artificial Intelligence (required to suggest optimization across devices).

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

Analytics that incorporate household usage behavior, automated demand response / lowering peak system usage, efficiency monitoring throughout the home, climate control by zones: expansion of sensor monitoring / automatic adjustment to high energy use devices like HVAC and water heaters; and automatic adjustments to occupancy information within the home (lighting, climate control, etc).

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

Proliferation of sensors creates new opportunities to optimize energy usage within the home, connected thermostats open up new ways to monitor the HVAC system, distributed storage is coming – and customers will need someone to monitor and maintain these new systems, and opportunity for meaningful and relevant alerts and recommendations.

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

Proliferation of sensors will help providers diagnose energy efficiency opportunities, new information will provide more accurate and personalized recommendations for efficiency improvements that could materially impact usage, and smart home systems potentially accelerate the adoption of on-site generation and storage by allowing better control of household demand.

How will energy providers expand the energy monitoring services market?

By merging device data with usage data, helping customers understand the potential impact of behavioral changes, and moving to a future where customers can define guidelines around household climate comfort and a target bill amount, and energy companies will automatically help manage to those targets.

Kevin 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.