The future of energy is local, in our smart homes

Picture a home that generates its own energy, has solar, batteries, EV chargers, heat pumps, and a sophisticated software and hardware system that seamlessly manages, in the most cost effective way, when to use power you generate yourself, when you draw power from the grid, or sell energy back into the grid, when you use power generated by one of your neighbours, or sell them power when you have plenty.

And all of this is done seamlessly using a home energy management system - you don’t have to worry about when the sun goes down, or whether you should race out and unplug your car, or whether you’re getting the best price for the power you generate and use. It will all be managed for you.

That’s the vision of Raghu Belur, the Chief Product Officer for Enphase, a high tech clean energy company based in California that supplies integrated energy systems like solar and batteries. It's Belur's job to think about the future and work out what clean energy technology we will need.

“The home becomes more and more intelligent, and the endpoints make more and more autonomous decisions,” Belur told the SwitchedOn podcast in a broad-ranging interview.

Rather than a ‘hub and spoke model’ where all our power generation is centralised, and the home is just a consumer, Belur says the home can become “the unit of intelligence.”

“It knows exactly what your solar is doing, your battery's doing, your cars are doing, your loads are doing, your consumption is doing. Everything's available at your fingertips.”

Belur believes our energy future will depend on what we do locally, in our homes. It’s anticipated we will need nearly three times the amount of power we currently use as many more houses transition to solar, batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps.

The grid will continue to be an important part of our energy future, but Belur thinks the best solution will be to generate and use energy locally. He also argues we can transition our homes much faster than we can decarbonise the grid.

“Technology evolves in ways where you go from centralised technologies to distributed technologies,” says Belur. “All the intelligence that was centralised, gets pushed to the end user, to the end point … we should see similar evolution in the energy infrastructure as well.”

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Belur concedes that not everyone will be able to afford high tech systems such as the ones Enphase manufactures, but he says financing is now easily available in California, and Europe, to purchase such systems because they are regarded as a secure ‘asset class.’

“Banks are more than willing to fund these energy systems…. I can go to my local bank and get a loan.”

A significant concern about digital technology such as home energy management systems though is the risk of cybersecurity and privacy breaches.

Belur says energy security is a big deal, but it is possible to design energy systems that stay a step ahead of managing security so systems don't get hacked, if companies invest heavily in building robust systems.

He believes centralised power is also at risk of all forms of terrorism and jokingly suggests that the funding of energy should be part of a nation's defence budget.

But he believes communities and households with distributed energy systems can potentially be more resilient than those that are reliant on centralised power, not only against cyberterrorism but also adverse weather events.

During the last northern hemisphere winter, California was subjected to unprecedented storms and a lot of homes lost power. Belur says those that had distributed power systems proved more resilient.

“Homes were able to isolate and run off their solar and battery systems. So I think the resiliency happens at multiple levels - at the power delivery level, and also at the cyber level.”

Belur also told SwitchedOn that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – the landmark legislation passed by the US Congress in2022 which has injected over $500 billion into the US economy to accelerate America’s transition to net zero – has already had a massive impact on businesses like Enphase.

When Enphase started back in 2006, they hardly manufactured anything in the States. They began manufacturing in China, then expanded to India, Mexico and Romania.

Now, because of the incentives provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, they have just started manufacturing in the United States.

“Many solar companies, module companies, battery companies, inverter companies, are all moving manufacturing back to the United States,” says Belur.

“It just makes business sense to manufacture products where you're going to sell them.”

You can hear the full interview with Raghu Belur on the SwitchedOn podcast here.