CES 2017 - Retail Energy wrap-up

CES has grown massively and now has about 4,000 exhibitors and 180,000 attendees converging on Vegas for their annual dose of “smart” stuff. This is wrap-up of announcements I think are relevant to energy retailers, given their shift towards digital.

One of the big trends this year was integration of Artificial Intelligence and voice control into everything, in particular Amazon’s Alexa and the and Google Assistant appearing in products from fridges to cars to light switches. Accenture has been doing a great deal of work in developing AI based chat-bots for utilities and it's exciting to see these come to market. 

For the first time this year, CES featured a Smart Energy exhibition area, with companies showcasing new products in home energy management and solar. Interestingly this an area of the show was run completely on an independent energy microgrid (and monitored by one of the exhibitors, Curb).

There is a short video highlighting some of the Smart Energy exhibitors on the CES site, and we have complied a list of some of the more interesting exhibitors and product releases below.

Innovation in Solar

There were a lot of solar PV releases at CES in 2017 (full list here), and a few that stood out were Solpad which they bill as the “world’s first stand-alone AC micro-grid”, the Ergosun solarised roof tile to rival Tesla’s upcoming product, and Sunflare unveiled sticky, flexible, wallpaper-like solar panels which promises some interesting applications.

Smart Home

CES is a hot-bed of smart home announcements and releases, a few that caught my eye as being relevant to energy retail were the Nuro smart dimmer switch (which gives your lights ‘smart’ controls), Connected Sense’s Smart Outlet which wifi enables your power outlets, and Zipatile is a feature-packed smart home hub that also gives control over lighting & temperature control and was recognised in the CES Innovation Awards.

Home Energy Management and Monitoring

Two home energy management products that were exhibited at CES and look interesting are Curb and Ecoisme. It’s not clear how these compare with other products already in the market, but both look good.

EV’s

There was a huge focus on autonomous vehicles, and as you would expect, the concept cars on show were not diesel powered! The most hyped EV on show was the Faraday Futures FF91, an EV that in a CES PR stunt won a drag race against a Bentley Bentayga, a Ferrari 488 GTB, a Tesla Model X and a Tesla Model S. Faraday received 64,000 registrations in the first 36 hours of CES. Impressive given the self-driving function failed in the middle of a massive press conference!

Tesla were not officially on show at CES, but held an invite-only event at their new Gigafactory in nearby Reno before the expo started. “The $5 billion Gigafactory 1 plant was born out of Tesla’s massive need for lithium-ion batteries both for its vehicles -- including the Model 3 due in late 2017 -- as well as energy storage-devices such as the Powerwall” – Bloomberg.

While on the subject of batteries, one of the scariest new product releases was Cota Tiles, which are ceiling tiles that beam wireless charge to electronic devices underneath. The idea is that you would blanket your home or office with wireless power, in the same way you do now with wifi. Time for the tinfoil hat!

It will be interesting to see how energy retailers in the US partner with the companies above, either reselling products to their customers, white-labelling or incorporating technology into their own products.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the above, or anything you’ve read about CES that got you thinking. Put comments below....