5 Steps to Solar-Powered Profits

Installing security contractors are well positioned to adopt solar photovoltaic (PV) panels into their portfolios and take advantage of increasing opportunities to utilize “green” power alternatives. These solutions are ideal for projects that require a power supply for off-grid, remotely-installed equipment.

By Joe Bono | December 21, 2011

©iStockphoto.com/BanksPhotos

More and more installing security contractors are seeing the light and expanding into solar power solutionsto service their customers. One example of this is the installation of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels to power security systems in remote locations that otherwise lack electricity and communications infrastructure. Solar is also used to provide power for portable and temporary security systems such as construction sites. And some security systems integrators and vendors are deploying "green" power alternatives by adding small solar chargers to wireless devices like detectors.

Solar solutions utilized today in the electronic security industry are proving to be a cost-effective means to solving difficult problems. But there is another important solar option integrators need to consider — one that results in business growth while offering consumer and business customers another service. That opportunity is the installation of solar power systems for homes and businesses, a market that's become as hot as the sun's rays. Read on to find out what simple steps you can take to implement solar power solutions within your portfolio of services.

Getting Started in Solar Power

The U.S. solar power market grew 67 percent in 2010, making it the fastest-growing energy sector, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research. Solar PV installation led the industry in demand, a market that doubled from 2009 with 16 states installing more than 10 megawatts of PV each. The top 10 states were California, New Jersey, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina and Texas.

Solar PV installation offers a great fit for security dealers and integrators with many of the same skill sets involved: electrical work, engineering experience, quality control, plus safety and project management.

With solar a hotspot in today's cool economy, installing security contractors interested in getting involved in the industry should consider five key steps before expanding into this marketplace. Let's take look at the particulars:

1. Learn the foundation — Solar PV is a 60-year-old technology. The panels are made up of tiny cells of treated silicon. Each panel collects solar radiation and converts it into an electrical current. These panels are then wired together in a series to create an array, and the electrical output from that array travels through wires and conduit to an inverter typically located near your breaker box. The inverter converts the electrical current or direct current (DC) into alternating current (AC).

The backbone of the solar industry is net metering. This means any power that isn't used from the system spins the meter backwards, giving you a credit from the utility company. As the industry has expanded, courses on the fundamentals of solar PV have become widespread. Understanding how solar PVs interact with the home or building shortens the learning curve and allows security integrators to build on their existing knowledge and skill set.

2. Assess where you need help — There is a benefit to being a contractor. You likely understand how to market your business and sell a service while maintaining fruitful relationships with vendors and customers. When it comes to solar PV installation, some installing security contractors will want to subcontract an electrician or hire one on full time under their new solar division. In many states and municipalities, an electrician is required to install the solar equipment into the building's electric utility system. The tools may also differ from the security industry.

Also consider adding someone with roofing experience to your installation staff. Because roofers understand roofing systems, they can safely tie solar panels and equipment into a roof with proper flashing so the structure and the solar equipment will last. Solar installation is very reliant on roofing and electrical, so it's important to research what you can take on and where you may need to contract out.

3. Research licensing requirements — Every state has different licensing laws and it's important to understand the requirements for solar PV in your area. The majority of states require an individual license per trade. Check with your state's department of labor to find out what licensing requirements are needed in your marketplace.

4. Get hands-on experience — Once you've obtained your license and gone through the supplementary training to become a solar installer, the challenge becomes gaining experience. As a security integrator you have the option to leverage your current residential and commercial customer base to sell solar PV. In addition to getting on bid lists, it's sometimes advantageous to contact more established installers and offer to subcontract on their projects while you gain experience.

Joining a solar franchise network is another option. Solar franchise networks can provide best practices and support you in booking jobs. A good solar franchise network will also give you access to greater purchasing power, which allows you to price yourself more competitively. Integrated sales and marketing training, and best practice sharing provided by solar franchise networks can also put you at a competitive advantage.

5. Work incentives into your price — It's important to understand tax incentives when determining how to quote a solar installation. Do your research. Incentives are issued at both state and federal levels. Some utility companies also offer rebates to customers that install solar.

It's also a good idea to research software tools that can help you stay apprised of the changing rebates and incentives. Taking rebates into consideration when pricing offers a value proposition to your customer and allows you to remain competitive in a growing market.

A Sun Belt of Opportunity

To sum it all up, solar electric power is a key technology that installing security contractors can adopt into their portfolios of services in a straightforward manner. For the appropriate application, solar PV installations can provide continuous, reliable and cost-effective power while helping overcome challenging project sites. With installing security technicians already having many of the skill sets necessary to install solar PV equipment, success in this market can be easily achieved with little organizational disruption.

Joe Bono is President and CEO of Solar Universe Network, a solar installation franchise and finance company based in South San Francisco. He can be contacted at (925) 455-4700.

Vivint Bets Its Solar Offering Will Shine

Vivint, a national provider of residential security, energy management and automation solutions, thought so much about the potential for solar power to significantly impact its bottom line that it created an entirely new business during 2011.

The Provo, Utah-based company, formerly APX Alarm, ramped up Vivint Solar in October after it received $75 million in financing from U.S. Bancorp in support of its plan to offer solar installations for homes in New Jersey, Utah, Hawaii and New York.

Namely marketed through door-to-door sales, the company installs, monitors and maintains residential solar panels with no upfront costs. Customers agree to a 20-year contract during which they purchase the power generated by the solar panels for a lower rate than utilities charge.

"We approach homeowners who never thought they could get solar and improve their carbon footprint and feel proud about the generation of the power they use," says Vivint Solar COO Brendon Merkley. "They may not be super familiar with the product, but that is the beauty of the consultative sale. We can present it to them as something that maybe they have not formerly considered but is now obtainable and available to them."

The solar panels, which are installed on rooftops by Vivint Solar technicians, are designed to generate about 80 percent of a residence's overall electricity use. The company first marketed its solar platform in New Jersey during the summer and so far has completed about 200 installations. The company's initial tax-equity fund will finance about 2,400 installations.

"For the time being we are focused mostly on New Jersey, but we are eager to expand to other states that the fund allows," Merkley says. "This isn't a product offering we can offer universally nationwide. It is a lot more dependent on local economics."

Vivint began adding home automation and energy management solutions to its portfolio in 2010, allowing customers to monitor and adjust their homes' thermostats, lighting and small appliances remotely. Vivint has signed up about 77,000 customers for its home energy management platform. And while solar complements Vivint's core competencies in providing home services, Merkely says, there currently is no integration between the home automation platform and Vivint Solar's offering.

"In the future it will be more of a holistic sale that could include complementary products such as an energy management platform integrated with the solar installation," he says. "That is a product we have not yet developed but we are keen to do so and think it will be very powerful. We wanted to first assure ourselves that the business could stand on its own as a product offering and so we have marketed it almost exclusively independent of home automation."

Merkley says the company has "toyed around" with a couple of use cases that integrate the security panel with the firm's other platforms.

"The panel is this beautiful real estate in the home that functions as an in-home display for energy management. It is a perfect opportunity to display the solar power production on that alarm control panel," he says. "Additionally you can go beyond an information presentation analytics into to more energy automation and efficiencies where you might choose which appliances to run according to different times of the day where the solar array may be producing power opposed to when it's not."

— Rodney Bosch

USVI Going Solar

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The U.S. Virgin Islands are a great place to visit, but you wouldn't want to pay energy bills there. The tiny U.S. territory in the Caribbean has just 110,000 residents, all the beach, surf, wind and sun you'd ever want, but energy prices that are four to five times higher than are paid in the continental United States.

Like many islands on earth, the USVI are almost 100 percent dependent on imported oil for electricity.  Residents pay about 47 cents per kilowatt hour to light their homes and run their appliances. Imported oil is even used to desalinate the water because there is so little fresh water available other than what residences catch on their roof in the form of rain water.

But USVI Gov. John P. de Jongh Jr., working with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the U.S. Department of Interior, has vowed to transform energy use dramatically.  In January, at his State of the Territory address, he announced the goal of reducing use of fossil fuels by 60 percent in the next 15 years.

That's huge, and a great challenge, and just possibly a blueprint for how to achieve those similar reductions on the mainland.

"What we're attempting to do is integrate every large portion of renewable energy into our system," said Karl Knight, the director of USVI's energy office, who also is a board member of the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority.  Think of it as a pilot for how to integrate renewables as a large proportion of the grid."

To get there, a half dozen different technologies need to be implemented, and energy efficiency will have to become a rallying cry.

A Recipe for Energy Savings

That's where NREL's scientists and engineers are helping.

The United States, New Zealand, and Iceland are three of the leading actors in the international partnership, Energy Development in Island Nations (EDIN), and for the United States, its Virgin Islands territory was a natural fit.

"We wanted to help USVI particularly because the governor was very committed to transforming the energy infrastructure, as was the CEO of their utility," NREL's Adam Warren, who heads NREL's EDIN program, said.

NREL has helped USVI — its government, utilities and public and private groups — to map the renewable energy potential, and to determine how to get to a 60 percent reduction by 2025. Early on, NREL produced a major technological report on grid integration, transmission and distribution.

"We think 60 percent is very realistic," Knight said. "The government established that goal in collaboration with NREL and the Island Nations global partnership. They challenged Gov. deJongh to be aggressive in his goal-setting and he took them up on it. We established the aggressive goal because we spend so much on  The only thing that people in the Virgin Islands talk about is the size of their electric bills."

The high rates have hurt low-income residents and have been a deterrent to economic investment, Knight said. "If the rate is going to be 40 cents a kilowatt hour or more, it shapes the type of business that's willing to locate in the Virgin Islands," he said. "Our total dependence on oil for power generation in an era of expensive crude oil is having a huge impact."

USVI burns 2.6 million barrels of oil each year to generate electricity and desalinate water.

The recipe to achieve a 60 percent reduction:

• 2 percent biomass
• 3 percent landfill gas
• 3 percent solar
• 6 percent wind
• 8 percent waste-to-energy
• 38 percent energy efficiency

NREL's Karen Petersen said the most cost-effective way to reduce fossil-fuel use — the low-hanging fruit, so to speak — is "to help the utility become more efficient in its operations." Simple measures such as turning off lights in buildings and lowering the air conditioning use in tourist hotels also will help immensely.

"We're working to create a whole cultural shift," Petersen said. "They're very conservative in their use of energy because of need, but it doesn't necessarily revolve around an environmental ethic."

Island residents "had a healthy dose of skepticism" when the plan for more solar, wind and biomass was proposed because past proposals haven't kept their promises, Knight said. "But we have tried to convince the community that we're not promising lightning in a bottle. This is a 15-year strategy," Knight said. "We're using tried and commercially proven technologies, gathering up the best practices and working in close consultation with energy experts such as the folks at NREL.

"This is not a developer selling some Star Trek technology that is going to save the day," Knight added. "It's is going to be a gradual build-up to what we believe is a successful achievement of our goals."

Energy Transformation Isn't Easy

Dramatically changing how an island, a state or a nation gets its energy presents enormous challenges, not the least being a shaking of cultural norms.

"That's why we work with the entire community," said Warren. "In the past, they've seen systems go in by these fly-by-night developers that don't work the way they're supposed to.

"You need everyone on board — government, the private and public sectors to get something that big," Warren said. "We set up working groups to attack different areas — efficiency, renewables, transportation."

That's been key, Knight said. "We've been able to secure some good partnerships that have really put some effort into helping us achieve the goal.  Through the assistance of NREL, we've established local working groups, both public sector and private sector and the participation of non-government organizations."

Some 80 percent of the USVI's economy is dependent on tourism. Tourist hotels use much more electricity, especially in the form of A/C, than does the average full-time resident. "If you're not using A/C, most of the load is going toward heating water or keeping the refrigerator cold," Warren said. In all, the household usage is about half of what it is in the United States — 450 kwh per month compared to 900 kwh.

Moving Renewables onto the Grid

One of the thorniest challenges is how to get so much renewable energy on the grid and still have it operate smoothly all hours of the day.

Solar and wind energy are variable — they surge onto the grid when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but trickle or stop when the winds calm and the sun sets, or even when a thick cloud passes by.

Happily for the USVI, the highest electrical use is when the sun is shining — and all those tourists want the air conditioning cranked up.

Still, the variability means that distributed systems make more sense. So, USVI likely will have small solar arrays on dozens of rooftops, and just a few of the larger solar projects; likewise, wind energy is likely to be distributed widely, with a mix of small turbines and some larger turbine farms.

Combining wind and solar energy with electricity generated from closed landfills and waste gives a nice balance of variable sources and so-called dispatchable sources — the kind that utilities can ramp up and down to match demand.

Tackling how to load a high rate of renewables onto the grid will help the mainland United States, too. "We as a nation want to figure out the problems associated with a high-penetration of renewables," Warren said. "We hope we can show that first in the islands like USVI and Hawaii.

Islanders Face Tough Choices

Virgin Islanders have heard horror stories about installed renewables that couldn't handle the load because the variability was too much, so part of NREL's job is to show how the proper steps with the right technology can make it a success.

Island residents are leery of overloading the grid with too much renewable energy, but they're faced with the reality of 47 cents per kilowatt hour. They're facing serious tradeoffs, Warren said. "Do I pay my electricity bill or do I buy my medication?' is a real question that is forced on many."

"They're motivated to bring renewables on board and to conserve as much as possible because they need to," Petersen said. Businesses are closing daily because of the cost of electricity.

Optimism Grows from NREL/USVI Partnership

Knight is confident, and says NREL's participation has been crucial. "First, it has given the policy-makers the confidence that they're making the right decisions," Knight said. "To have a neutral party to discuss decisions with, to make sure that we are doing what is in the best interest of the population and the governor's goal, gives us and the policy makers credibility. We're able to say to the public, 'this isn't pie-in-the-sky.'"

"We've sat down with the greatest experts in the nation out in Golden, Colo., and discussed our plans — and they've endorsed them fully. We can tell the most passionate members of our community that we've had conversations with NREL and, yes, they've endorsed the proposed projects."

"Our first and foremost goal is to assist other small island nations to curb their appetites for fossil-fuel-derived energy and to provide a model on the cost and investment return on the latest technologies."

"We're hoping there's a lesson to be learned here to benefit larger systems. Hopefully, we can be the test bed for the rest of the nation and the globe."

Original Article: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/01/nrel-helping-virgin-islands-cut-fuel-use-with-renewables?cmpid=rss

Home Energy Management: 8 Big Trends in 2011

The market is still small, but 2011 showed that home area networking technologies are here to stay.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/home-energy-management-8-big-trends-in-20111/

The notion of a home area network is vague indeed. As with the term 'smart grid,' ask two people what it means and you’ll get different answers. In the home space, it’s about a connected, energy-efficient home. Most people mention smart appliances and wireless thermostats. Others think of utility web portals and energy feedback data via snail mail.

The definition remained cloudy throughout 2011, but the industry saw advancements in fits and starts. Despite the exit of some major players, savvy startups saw deals on a much larger scale than in any previous years.

Although the market is still not clearly defined, home area networking in the energy space made enough noise in 2011 to let investors, utilities, and even some consumers know that it is here to stay. Here are the biggest trends in home energy management in 2011.

Convergence 

There was a time in the distant past (that is, about three years ago) when home energy management startups had distinct offerings. Some were selling paper mailings with information about energy use, others had connected thermostats, while others still had powerful software platforms to drive efficiency and support demand response. Although analytics were the underlying foundation of all of these products, they were sold in very different casings.

Those days are waning. Now, utilities are thinking about scale and future-proofing their choices. No one knows what the iPhone of 2020 will be.

Opower, which has long been the champion of low-tech offerings via snail mail and web portals,partnered with Honeywell to marry the wireless thermostat with analytics.

On the other side, EnergyHub, which once called the dashboard central to its offerings, launched a platform that will be offered to television and cable providers, home security companies and utilities as a software-as-a-service that can ride on top of any wireless thermostat. The dashboard is still available, and EnergyHub sees the new service as complementary to, but not in competition with, its classic dashboard and software offerings.

Other companies, like Tendril, are offering up their products in any way clients want them.Tendril has already moved away from pilots that always include a hardware component to full deployments that might not put in a single thermostat for years.

Having the right solution for the market today, and tomorrow, isn’t just about having both hardware and software, but also about forging alliances. Trilliant established home energy device partners in the U.K. and in North America. Tendril is also partnering up with other vendors, such as ecobee. Integration is not just a trend in the home market, but also a larger trend in smart grid -- and one of Greentech Media’s top 5 smart grid trends of 2011.

Open Data Access 

Access to energy data is coming, even if it’s not as fast as some people would like. Even the White House weighed in during the past year, calling for all customers to have real or near-real-time access to energy use information.

But the question of who owns and distributes that data has been up for debate until recently. It’s still up for debate in most of the U.S., and most of the world for that matter, but some states are moving ahead.

California published smart grid data privacy rules, stating that consumers can share their information with third parties. For consumers who want to share their information with an outside company, a utility tariff will require that any home area network device that is “locked” to a certain third party, which will start transferring information from the smart meter, must be in compliance with the CPUC requirements. The utilities have six months to create those tariffs. They also must start a pilot study within six months to provide real-time or near-real-time pricing information to their customers.

Texas is arguably ahead of California. The Texas Public Utility Commission lead a committee that decided that Texans who are customers of the state’s four large energy delivery companies will be able to share their energy data with third parties as early as next year. The Lone Star state is already in the lead by requiring that every smart meter customer has access to their data through a website or other means.

Although Texas and California are only two of fifty states, they are big and they are further ahead on the smart grid curve than most other states. What Texas and California choose to do, others are likely to follow. And if the White House puts its money where its mouth (or policy paper) is, there will be easily accessible energy information for all. But don’t hold your breath.

Utilities large and small are also finding that a little bit of information goes a long way to win hearts and minds. Text alerts when bills cross certain thresholds and websites or emails to check the past week’s energy use are extremely popular with customers of both co-ops and big IOUs.

Now that some of the biggest kinks have been worked out in some of the biggest states, providing energy data -- and letting customers take it to other vendors -- will start to become a reality. Expect a trickle in 2012 and real movement in the market in 2013. 

HAN Proves Its Business Case

Many people, including this reporter, have questioned whether utilities want to shell out $400 per home to curb load. Pilots abound, but there are few examples of very large-scale projects to reduce residential load through HAN technologies.

That changed this year at Oklahoma Gas & Electric, which will install 150,000 smart thermostats for customers taking part in a critical peak pricing program to eventually shed 210 megawatts over the next three years.

In Oklahoma, the summers are hot, and delaying the build-out of new generation capacity is worth the $300 to $400 per home to install and operate the hardware. The utility also hopes to target some small commercial sites with the program.

Although reducing peak to delay generation is how OGE built its business case, Mike Farrell, director of customer programs at OGE, also told Greentech Media that this is about morphing into the utility of the future -- one that provides a suite of energy services instead of just holding the wires and sending monthly bills. 

Social Media Push 

It seems as though the entire world is on Facebook. Utilities are, too -- well, some of them, anyway. Bounce Energy, an energy retailer in Texas, has more than 46,000 fans of its Facebook page. Reliant Energy, owned by NRG Energy, is just below 10,000, but it has a full-time social media team and even has a YouTube page filled with silly, fun, energy-related videos.

Although the two Texan examples show some of the more progressive efforts, others are catching on. Opower is launching a Facebook app early in 2012 that will be available to everyone, but is primarily tailored for customers of Opower’s utility clients. The app, developed in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council, will allow participating consumers to benchmark their energy use against similar homes, compare usage with friends, enter energy-savings competitions and share efficiency tips.

Constellation is also digging deeper into social media through a partnership. Constellation has formed an alliance with Lucid, an energy dashboard company that is best known for its work in institutions using competition and social media to drive energy efficiency and automated demand response participation. “It’s about making conservation a more viral offering,” Chris Cantone, senior vice president sales of load response at Constellation Energy, told Greentech Media when the partnership was announced.

Using partners to leverage social media will likely be a trend in coming years, but some homegrown social media expertise doesn’t hurt either. (Note to utilities: just have some interns get something started; they can probably do it in a day.)

Many utilities are successfully using Twitter, especially during outages. During the recent power outage at Candlestick Park during a Monday Night Football game, Pacific Gas & Electric actively tweeted the situation, even though they had no idea what was going on at the time. Other utilities have said that just jumping in head first (see intern note above) and having a presence -- any presence -- on social media has paid off.

Now that many utilities are getting comfortable with social media, they can start doing more with it. More promotions, more energy efficiency initiatives, more customer interaction. For those that do it right, they can get customers to trust them and even like them -- and not just on Facebook.

Big Software Gets Out of Home Energy Management, Big Box Stores Get In

Goodbye, Google. Goodbye, Microsoft. Hello, Best Buy.

Both Google and Microsoft killed off their home energy management platforms in the middle of 2011. A lot of hubbub was made about it, and hence it makes this list, but it’s not actually as big a deal for the market as some media outlets would make it seem.

Google PowerMeter said at the time, "We first launched Google PowerMeter as a Google.org project to raise awareness about the importance of giving people access to data surrounding their energy usage. [...] We’re pleased that PowerMeter has helped demonstrate the importance of this access and created something of a model. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like, so we are retiring the service.”

In fairness, Google did help raise the profile of the industry, but so did many other startups that are squarely focused in the market. However, Google didn’t put much muscle behind PowerMeter, and the offering was adequate but not anything spectacular. Ditto for Microsoft’s Hohm, which was essentially useless if you lived in a multi-family dwelling or had already made all of the basic energy efficiency upgrades (changing light bulbs, etc.).

In Microsoft’s case, it decided to concentrate more on commercial office space, where the payoffs for energy management are much higher than most homes. Google is down, but I wouldn’t count them out completely. They are interested in energy. Kansas City (both KS and MO) are going to be test beds for Google’s broadband service, and utilities in both cities are partners in the project. Home energy management tools will be delivered, at least in Kansas City, KS -- and it’s possible that Google will jump back into the HAN space in a much more significant way when the market has matured in a few years.

The bigger story in terms of heavy hitters coming and going from the HAN market is Best Buy making a push to own the space. Light bulbs and weather stripping are coming to Best Buy. They’ve already sold out of Nest thermostats for the year. Big city stores like Chicago are testing out home energy audits. Geek Squad for home networking? Yeah, they’ve got that.

When the big-box stores decide to make a real push into the space, that’s when the action will happen. That is where people shop. Best Buy is bringing these technologies to the masses where they already are. General Electric will be market-testing its home energy management platform in big-box stores in 2012. Home Depot already has $100 wireless thermostats from Radio Thermostat of America, which has partnerships with EnergyHub and Trilliant.

For Best Buy, it’s not just about energy, either -- after all, driving efficiency in the home is only so exciting. The store also sells electric vehicle chargers and refrigerators that can tell you if your milk has gone bad (and also happen to be extremely energy-efficient). Home area networking and the smart home aren’t just about energy.

Packaging the energy component with everything else home networking can offer makes for a more robust sales pitch to the average person. Getting a new GE washer and dryer? Maybe theGE Nucleus home energy manager could be packaged in with a rebate.

Energy management makes a whole lot more sense if it’s sold with the stuff that uses that energy. As people often note at smart grid conferences, we're not buying electrons from the utility; we’re buying warm showers and cold beer.

British Home Invasion

If you think getting a monthly electric bill with no visibility into your daily usage is ridiculous, then the United Kingdom’s process is absurd.

The U.K. is an exceedingly appealing market for home energy management companies for many reasons, not least of all because consumers only have their meters read once a year and just pay estimated bills the rest of the time.

Lack of information, coupled with government action on smart grid projects -- including nationwide smart meters -- has made the U.K. one of the most interesting smart grid countries to watch in 2011.

In Smart Grid in Europe, 2012-2016, GTM Research reported that only around 110,000 smart meters have been installed to date in the U.K, but that the government has called for all households to have dual (electricity and gas) smart meters by 2020 -- a figure that will mean about 47 million devices will be put in place in the coming decade.

The uptake of consumer behavior programs is not surprising, as the U.K. government released a report earlier this year about how to empower people to save energy through rebates or other programs.

The government is currently undergoing trials for its Green Deal, which looks to help homeowners with energy efficiency improvements with no upfront cost starting in October 2012. The plan is that people can spend up to £10,000 ($16,500) for efficiency upgrades that can be paid back using savings from future utility bills. Like PACE programs in the U.S., the savings would be tied to the building.

The government support for reaching out to consumers for efficiency gains means that domestic and international companies are jockeying for position in the market. Homegrown companies AlertMe and Onzo are already working with some of the biggest utilities and telecoms, and 2011 saw Opower move across the Atlantic, as did demand response giant EnerNOC. Trilliant, which is working with British Gas on its smart meter rollout, announced a U.K. Interoperability Group for home energy management technologies. There is still a lot of work to be done, but the meters will go in quickly, and companies are poised and ready to take advantage of meter data as soon as its available. 

Nest Labs: The Thermostat Gets Cool

When covering smart grid, this reporter is often drawn to the word 'sexy' -- but it always has the prefix 'un' before it. There’s not a lot of sex appeal in the electrical utility world. Until now.

The Nest Labs thermostat is just one of what seems to be zillions of cutting-edge, wireless smart thermostats available. But it’s so much more. First of all, it’s so popular it is sold out until 2012. Unlike many thermostats from startups, it’s available in Best Buy. And it’s, well, sexy.

The Nest Labs thermostat was also the media darling of the home energy management space in 2011. We don’t just mean that Greentech Media covered it -- and unstealthed the company in the process. The New York Times had a review dedicated to it, which doesn't happen often with thermostats. Every popular science and tech blog seemed to mention it. I wouldn’t be surprised if my grandmother has heard of it.

Sure, it’s just one device. But bringing some sex appeal, and smarts, to a topic that is still off of the radar for the average American is no small deal. It brings a buzz to the market that is badly needed. If nothing else, it helps to show some less-than-progressive regulators that there are desirable products on the market that consumers are clamoring for -- and utilities need to have the systems in place to leverage the connected homes that are coming sooner than many people had anticipated.

Small Commercial Comes of Age

Yes, this last one isn’t about homes at all. But small commercial energy managementdeserves a shout-out in 2011 because it is finally getting its due. In some cases, HAN companies such as Powerhouse Dynamics are tweaking their offerings to appeal to small businesses.

In other cases, startups like EnTouch Controls are shunning both homes and corporations and only working on small and medium commercial.

In some ways, there are similarities between the home and a small business. There is no facility manager, and whoever is paying the utility bill has little time to devote to such matters. The returns are also not necessarily as high as they are in the commercial and industrial space.

There are stark differences, as well. Although returns may not be as high for small commercial, in industries like restaurants and convenience stores, energy costs can still be quite high. In other markets, like retail, sensors are able not only to monitor energy use, but can also give visibility into shopping patterns to maximize the use of space and resources. In California, small commercial buildings make up nearly 25 percent of peak summer demand.

Large utilities are trying to find inroads to small commercial spaces and are just beginning to see results. Con Edison is finally seeing success with its Green Team, which hoofs it around New York City talking to small businesses about energy-efficiency upgrades, smart thermostats, and demand response programs.

Constellation Energy is also looking for a stronger presence with the little guys. One of the reasons for its recent partnership with Lucid was to have a product that could appeal to small and medium commercial customers.

It’s still early days, and the efforts will have to be huge. Con Edison has more than 100 people working in this sector alone. But there are some lessons from the home space that have allowed companies to adapt their offerings, or create new ones, to tackle a market that has bigger returns than the residential market.

KATHERINE TWEED: DECEMBER 28, 2011