Reimagining smart homes: From connected convenience to future-ready intelligence

REBECCA BITTER: Hello. I'm Rebecca Bitter, product manager from Eaton's Connected Solutions division, here with another Eaton 10 in 10 podcasts.

Today, homes have the ability to generate power and now, homeowners are more empowered to take control of how they manage their home energy needs more than ever before. Today, I'm here with John Vernacchia, energy transition segment director, and Advait Katarki, business development manager from Eaton's Connected Solutions division, to talk about how intelligent home technology is playing an important role in advancing the energy transition.

John, Advait, we've got 10 minutes and 10 questions so let's get started. John, let's start with you. At the highest level, what are some of the macro trends impacting today's energy needs?

JOHN VERNACCHIA: Rebecca, there's a couple of macro trends that are happening in what we call the energy transition, the first of which is the increasing demand for more sustainable energy and renewable energy sources in our homes and buildings. The second is the electrification of things within our homes-- moving to more electric hot water heaters and heat pumps-- as well as other macro trends, like the electrification of transportation. And then, a third area is the increasing demand for digitization and connectivity and so, how do we connect all these loads together and how do we provide information about what's happening with all these loads within our homes?

REBECCA BITTER: So you mentioned energy transition, globally, power outages are becoming more common due to natural disasters. How does this impact grid stability?

JOHN VERNACCHIA: There's, kind of, two parts to that. From one perspective, we are seeing a lot more natural disasters with blizzards, deep freezes, hurricanes, wildfires, and so, there's more and more cases where the local utility power may not be available. So how do we make our homes more resilient to be able to keep critical loads within our home operating when the utility power isn't available?

The second part to that would be, how can, perhaps, energy stored in a home-- whether that's in stationary storage or a vehicle-- maybe make itself available to the grid, to help the grid be more stable in more normal operating conditions? And that could account for solar PV, as well, too. So having that information and data available where utility can see would be important.

REBECCA BITTER: So it's pretty clear that electrification will have a significant impact on how the grid operates. How does this impact stakeholders, like utilities and homeowners?

JOHN VERNACCHIA: So let's take the homeowners, first. One way is, how can these different assets within our home be utilized to make our homes more resilient? And as loads become more electrified in our homes-- things like our electric vehicles for transportation and electric hot water heaters and electric heat pumps-- how do we understand what's going on with those loads? And how do we manage them to optimize our electricity costs? So that's one perspective from the homeowner's view.

From the utilities view is, how do we make information about all those new electrical loads available and visible to the utility so that they're able to better understand what's going on with their residential customers and manage the grid better and optimize the grid at a higher level? And from our perspective, at Eaton, we're calling this a Home as a Grid concept because now, you're getting homes that are also, not only consuming electricity, but generating electricity and how can that home work as an optimized system to provide value to both the homeowner and the utility?

REBECCA BITTER: Let's talk more about this Home as a Grid concept. At a basic level, what does that mean?

JOHN VERNACCHIA: It's really providing a coordinated system within the home for all those distributed energy resource assets so things like solar PV on your roof, a battery energy storage system in your garage, a residential generator out behind the house, an electric vehicle in your driveway. How do all those things work together within your home to make your home more resilient and optimize your electricity costs? And how do we use intelligence, like smart circuit breakers and software, to really allow your home to operate as a grid?

REBECCA BITTER: Thanks, John. Let's turn it over to you. How does smart home technology play a role in enabling the energy transition?

ADVAIT KATARKI: Thanks, Rebecca, for the question. We're seeing a convergence of smart home and energy management. Smart products in the home can now add in context of what's going on in the energy grid or even on site renewables and react to that, while also providing insights to the homeowner that can help them make more sustainable choices and we are already seeing this happen.

A good example is I work with Samsung SmartThings Energy, but the smart home system is collecting information from the smart breakers and smart appliances to provide energy insights and also, taking demand response signals to either shift load during peak demand times or shed load during these times to help the grid.

REBECCA BITTER: So as more homes integrate solar and energy storage, what have you been doing to help enable that?

ADVAIT KATARKI: That's a great question. We're really making it easy for homeowners and installers to integrate solar and storage through the use of our smart breakers, as well as the smart load center. The load center is a central point in the home where power comes in and is distributed around so by adding intelligence and enhanced control, we are really simplifying the installation, adding more flexibility to the system. This also really provides the homeowners the tools to maximize the benefit of these distributed energy resources that they're investing in for their home.

REBECCA BITTER: Can you give us just one example of how these technologies can help homeowners take control of how they manage their energy consumption?

ADVAIT KATARKI: Yes. Absolutely. I mean, there are a lot of examples. Really, a simple example will be time of use optimization. What do we mean by time of use? A lot of utilities are deploying these new tariffs where it is cheaper to use energy during off peak times and more expensive to use energy during those peak times.

So how are we helping? Eaton smart breakers, they allow you to turn off non-essential loads or even flexible loads, like EV charging, during these peak rate hours and then, shift that usage to non-peak hours, where energy is often 10 times cheaper. We enable this with our smart breakers. You can use them to schedule loads to be on or off during certain times of the day or even EV charges so now, you can schedule charging sessions based on your ToU tariff. That way, you're not just helping the homeowner save energy, but they're also helping the grid, while doing so.

REBECCA BITTER: You also mentioned EV chargers. As more and more homeowners choose to purchase electric vehicles, how does this impact their energy needs at home?

ADVAIT KATARKI: What we're seeing is home energy management will be more important as EV expansion happens. So today, there are roughly around 2 million EVs on the US loads and by the end of the decade, we expect that to be about 22 million by various different market research estimates and there's an expectation that almost 78% of the charging is expected to happen at home, so the real correlation between EV adoption and the impact it will have on the power distribution system in the home.

And based on the various research reports and also, 100 home pilot that we did here at Eaton, we expect that EVs will continue to become the largest load in most homes and will likely double the home's energy consumption as more EVs are added. So that's why technologies, like smart load center, the smart breaker, as well as smart charging, come into play to make sure that the infrastructure upgrades that are required to support EV charging is cost effective and then, we're also being able to use this new flexible load of EV charging for grid services, which is what we need to stabilize this modern and dynamic grid that we're building.

REBECCA BITTER: It sounds like the home's energy ecosystem is getting pretty complex. How can the industry ensure these technologies work together seamlessly for the homeowner?

ADVAIT KATARKI: What we feel is no one company can do it all in this space. Consumers are really looking for a simple and a single pane of glass experience and ensuring these various systems talk to each other seamlessly will ensure that we maximize the benefit of these technologies and create a delightful experience for the homeowner. And that's been a focus in building these partnerships with like-minded leading organizations in this space, be it in the dome space with the likes of Virtual Peaker and Sunverge, smart home platform providers, like Samsung SmartThings and Alarm.com, or distributed energy resources system providers, like LG Electronics. So that's what we're working on in terms of building these partnerships to really give a simple and cohesive experience for the homeowner.

REBECCA BITTER: John, Advait, one last question to you both. What are you working on today that you're most excited to see develop in the future?

JOHN VERNACCHIA: Eaton, for many years, has been providing solutions to our residential customers for connecting things like solar PV to homes and then, more recently, battery storage to homes. One of the things I'm really excited about is some of the work that's going on in the research lab on how we're collaborating on a project to make vehicle to grid and vehicle to home more of a reality and allow the stored energy that's in your vehicle to someday be utilized to power your home or perhaps, push power back to the grid for different type of grid services programs.

ADVAIT KATARKI: And just to add to that, some of our solutions, like smart load center, as well as the partnerships that we're working on right now and developing, they will really help us enable virtual power plants, as well as whole home demand response. The relevance and importance of these two things will continue to grow.

There are also some really exciting efforts around the use of blockchain technology for use cases like real-time energy pricing, as well as enabling energy transactions between microgrids and nanogrids in the future. So those are just some of the things that we're working on that really make me excited about our future.

REBECCA BITTER: This has been great. Thank you both for sharing your insights today.

To learn more about how we're leveraging the energy transition to power more sustainable, connected, and secure homes, visit Eaton.com/HomeAsAGrid.