Why Remote Monitoring and Home Energy Management should always go together

By Roel de Krom, product manager Home Energy Management and Remote Monitoring. 

Soon, selling decentralised energy assets like PV inverters or battery storage will not be enough in a competitive market. Additional services, like Remote Monitoring or Home Energy Management, can help manufacturers distinguish themselves from the competition. Here is why they should always go hand in hand.

Adding services to assets in a bullish market might just be the right move

With energy prices soaring, supply-chain shortages due to an ongoing pandemic and a housing industry booming, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are busy delivering enough assets to their distribution centres and installers. For instance, anybody wanting to buy a Solar PV inverter in Germany has to wait for at least twenty weeks for installation at this moment, while 6 to 8 weeks is the normal waiting time.

Differentiating on hardware or quality of installation alone is not sufficient anymore. The decentralised energy asset market has turned very price-competitive, and the positioning of actors is in constant shift. Adding services is one key factor to win this competition.

A combination of Remote Monitoring and Home Energy Management meets fundamental customer needs

And when it comes to what kind of services should be added, our daily interactions with market participants most often voice two kinds of needs:

1. Know everything is working fine. This often results in questions like: Does my asset work properly? Does it produce as much as it should? Is there an overview of all assets somewhere?
2. Know energy is used in the best way possible. This can be seen in requests like: Can you help me get the most out of my assets? How can I use my PV and battery to reduce my energy costs to the bare minimum? How can I make sure my assets avoid as many emissions as possible?

A combination of Remote Monitoring and Home Energy Management may satisfy both needs here. With Remote Monitoring, homeowners and service providers gain direct insight into the performance of their assets. Whether it concerns a performance of production, a defect, malfunction or connectivity, asset owners and service providers can be pro-actively notified and immediately know which steps must be taken to solve the problem.

Home Energy Management goes one step further: Here, the aim is not to provide insights and guarantee functioning assets only, but rather to ensure the optimal interaction between different assets within a household. It’s about connecting a PV inverter with battery storage, a wall charger, and a heat pump to achieve maximum return from self-consumption, capacity management, dynamic tariffs or contributing to balancing the grid.

Offering the win-win solution

Many industry partners don’t see Remote Monitoring and Home Energy Management as separate solutions. And they shouldn’t. They are complementary to each other, and this is one of the reasons GreenCom also offers them a service package combining transparency for decentralised energy assets as well as optimisation of energy flows in the household.

In the end, a well-carved combination of Remote Monitoring and Home Energy Management offers a win-win situation for the end customer and service provider:

• End customers enjoy real-time transparency and can follow everything that’s happening on their app. Also, they know their assets are running in the best way possible ensuring, e.g., that self-consumption is maximised. Finally, monitoring guarantees them that should something happen, it is taken care of immediately.
• Service providers on the other hand add additional services to their assets increasing their value while simultaneously cutting costs by reducing service requests and increasing customer satisfaction.

More content

• Learn everything about GreenCom’s Remote Monitoring use case. 
• Read the interview with Roel “Remote Monitoring is much more than cost-saving“.