Delivering solar power to homes is crucial for building out a green infrastructure that slashes emissions to beat back climate change. But getting renewable energy to the home is only half the battle. Efficiently managing how we use (and abuse) our sun’s daily largesse is just as important.
Arlington-headquartered Opower is the best of the bunch, according to a recent Navigant Research study. Navigant assessed 16 home energy management vendors using a proprietary methodology, and found that Opower’s product suite put it well out of the reach of its nearest smart-grid competitors, including Aclara, AlertMe and Silver Spring Networks.
“We didn’t find much lacking,” Navigant senior researcher Neil Strother explained in an interview. “Opower seems to be hitting on most cylinders.”
High-powered cylinders, if you will. President Obama stopped by Opower to say hello. The longest-serving administrator in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency, Carol Browner, joined Opower’s advisory board last month. “Opower is building software that allows utilities to address vulnerabilities in new and innovative ways around the world, and to maximize efficiency that saves money for consumers and reduces power consumption,” Browner explained in a statement.
“Opower scored highest for execution of broadly applied data analytics for multiple utility customers in multiple markets, scales and results,” Strother told SolarEnergy, “and strategy, for leveraging its platform across energy bill reports, web portals and behavioral demand-response programs.” Opower’s array of behavioral demand response data solutions was specifically designed for utilities to efficiently handle concurrent messaging, thermostat management, analytics and personalization for desktop and mobile. And things are running pretty smoothly, according to Navigant.
Incentives, subsidies or demographics were “not part of the scope of the leaderboard,” explained Strother, but it’s not hard to see why the well-connected Opower is catching fire. It’s deployed across utilities and plants nationwide, and internationally expanding to powerhouses like Japan’s Tepco — last seen desperately trying to figure out how to end its years-long nuclear nightmare at Fukushima-Daiichi. And Opower is accruing policy insiders and climate-change idealists, like Browner and Center for American Progress vet Richard Caperton.
It’s going to need them, and many more, if the company really wants to bring increasingly lethal utility emissions to a much greener heel.
“U.S. power plants emit roughly 2.4 billion tons of CO2 per year, accounting for approximately 40 percent of the nation’s total global warming pollution,” Opower’s blog recently explained. “We know reducing emissions is critical to curbing climate change. But, how do we cut them at the least cost to our economy?”
This article appeared at Solar Energy