How One Silicon Valley Visionary is Putting Energy on the Internet

When Ilen Zazueta-Hall joined Enphase five years ago, there wasn’t a commercial storage market in play. Fast forward a couple of years, and Australia is touted to be the number one global storage and solar market.

With 15 years’ experience in e-learning software and website development expertise, Ms Zazueta-Hall is well-versed in the business of increasing the efficiency of solar energy systems.

Ms Zazueta-Hall currently leads Enphase’s energy management system product team and is responsible for advancing the system across target business segments. Prior to obtaining her current role, Ms Zazueta-Hall led the company’s residential segment product team and was the software product manager of the Enphase Enlighten product, where she led a cross-functional team of software engineers, product managers and technical writers.

What was your first foray into renewables?
It was with Enphase five years ago. Prior to that, I worked in software – both at start-ups and with enterprises. I’d never intended on getting into solar, renewables or energy, but the opportunity was so compelling in terms of having a real impact on the world.

What’s a typical day for you?
Travelling is a huge part of it – part of my role is to understand our markets and not only our customers, but their customers. That informs our product design and development.

I spend a lot of time with our engineering team to help them understand what we’re seeing and how that translates into the technical requirements of what is needed. I have a bridging function; I have to ask myself, “What’s going on out in the world, and how do we respond to that?”

Some typical days are spent entirely out of the office on a different continent, but more generally, I sit in meetings or spend time observing our products’ useability. This can be by inviting homeowners to come in, try out our software, and see where they get stuck.

My team also works with solar installers; they watch them putting hardware in and working with the installer toolkit mobile app. We really have to watch for where people get stuck and observe their non-verbal cues. That’s a really fun part of what we do. It all comes back to our core principle – we’re trying to make solar simple.

Sometimes, however, my role is just making a decision. It may be an arbitrary decision, but it helps things move along and leads to action.

How do you pick your test subjects?
We try to pick folks who are representative; ideally folks who don’t have solar yet, but who are interested in it. We bring them in and we want them to be blank slates. We ask them questions such as: “Have we made it easy to understand? Have we made it simple enough that someone completely new to this can look at it, understand it and get a little excited about it?” We want to see smiles and head nods.

How do you keep abreast with the fast-evolving industry?
I do this a couple of different ways. I count on our teams who are on the ground – especially our field application engineers – who are out there providing guidance and helping with installations. They’re often who we hear from when there’s something new we should know about.

Our sales team supply a lot of feedback as well; that’s more specific to Enphase. The nice thing about having this complete solution with the software element is that we actually get a lot of direct feedback from the end users.

In terms of larger industry trends, I spend a lot of time trying to keep abreast of what’s going on with the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile application trends. I spend a lot of time reading.

How do you achieve a healthy work/life balance?
Because I do a lot of late nights and early mornings, it’s really important to me to try and keep some time for myself. I really try to keep my weekends for my family, but I don’t always succeed. I’m pretty good on Saturdays, but by Sunday evening, I’m already diving back into the work week.

Describe your leadership style.
Collaborative. Everyone brings their own expertise to the table and a lot of what I do is listening and synthesising different inputs.

What is the most exciting part of your job?
There are going to be good days and bad days, but even on bad days, the underlying ‘bigger mission’ of working in renewable energy keeps you inspired in a way that click-tracking doesn’t.

That’s the highlight of the job for me – seeing how our customers use our products. We spend months and years of work bringing this whole energy management system together, and talking to customers and seeing them use it is the most exciting bit.

You don’t hit it out of the park with every feature, but when you get those one or two people that say, “Hey, that really helped” or “That was a cool feature”, it’s a really good feeling.

What is the most challenging part of your job?
There are so many things we wish we could do but at the end of the day, it has to make business sense and fit in with our overall strategic priorities. Sometimes I just have to say, “That’s a really great idea, but we’re not going to do anything about it”. And that’s really hard.

Another challenge with having to service so many different markets are the time-zones. We’ve got the big mothership in California and making sure we connect people to the right folk can be pretty challenging.

What achievements are you most proud of since starting with Enphase?
I’m really excited about our new Envoy-S gateway and what that enables in terms of our overall solution.

But one of the things I’m most proud of was actually one of things I worked on in my first year at Enphase – putting together a vision about constructing an API (Application Programming Interface). It’s a bit geeky, but basically APIs are ways to let software applications talk to each other without having to have a human in the middle. It’s basically an agreed-to set of interfaces that you expose to the world.

Early on, we identified that we wanted folks to be able to access data from their systems and use it in ways that we hadn’t thought about, so we provided a system data API. There are all sorts of things that Enphase was not born to do, but we can enable other people to build on that data and technology and turn their ideas into reality.

It is a core piece of our strategy and it is going to become even more important as we move more into energy management. It’s not like there’s going to be one system to rule them all; things have to interact.

How has the storage and solar market changed over the last five years?
There is a storage market now; there wasn’t one five years ago. Not practically speaking. You saw off-grid solutions, but it was a niche. That’s really changing and in a lot of ways, I think Australia is leading the way, particularly in storage. There is a reason we’ve decided this is the first market in which we’re going to launch our AC battery.

Why does it make more sense in Australia than anywhere else?
You’ve got a combination of factors. You’ve got, frankly, high energy prices and low-feed in tariffs, which create more of an incentive for people to adopt storage. I’d personally rather save that power from the sun and use it later, rather than just feeding it back into the grid. So there’s that economic reason, and that’s key.

Another factor is that I sense Australians really want and embrace new technology, and that’s not necessarily true of all markets.

It’s a combination of the right economics and the right people who want that control and ownership over how they use energy.

How important are intelligent solar systems?
With increasing solar penetration rates, it becomes really important that systems are intelligent. They need to provide grid support capabilities to other participants in this energy infrastructure that’s evolving, and not just function as these dangling appendages.

If we’re going to be successful as an industry, it’s because we have these adaptive capabilities that ultimately bring intelligence out to the edge. It doesn’t really exist yet.

Software integration is critical when it comes to storage. Without software, there’s not much of a solution. You have to know when to charge and discharge that battery, and how to optimise when that energy
is used.

I heard an interesting quote in the IoT space revolving around this idea that hardware today is data wrapped in plastic. It’s really true. If your mobile phone worked in the same way as when you first bought it, you wouldn’t use it for very long. The fact that it changes and you can add applications is key.

How does Enphase’s AC battery compare to other products?
It is a solution; it’s a complete integrated system. You’re not bringing together different piece parts and trying to fit them together. The microinverter system, the Envoy-S gateway and the battery all work together.

That said, the microinverter technology makes it unique. The same benefits you get from microinverters in PV – because it’s per module – apply to storage. The modularity and flexibility goes to the heart of our mission to make everything as simple as possible.

The battery is also future proof. How you size a storage system is a little different to solar, because it’s based on how energy is consumed in a home. That changes a lot for various reasons. With an Enphase system, you can start with maybe two batteries, and then add more as your needs change.

From an economic perspective, we really hit a sweet spot in terms of being able to size things properly. Why buy a bunch of storage that you won’t need?

Enphase Australia's Rob Scholten with the powerful Envoy-S Metered, capable of monitoring solar, storage, consumption and grid power all at once.

When do you think storage stopped being a niche technology?
We’re at the start of the up. A lot of it will be driven by what solar was driven by: economic and regulatory market dynamics. What we will continue to see is technology costs coming down and capabilities going up. It’s a classic adoption curve. You’ve got your early adopters. Right now, solar is just shading into early majority. Storage right now feels like where solar was when Enphase was just starting out in 2006. It feels like the start of something that could be just as big as solar, if not bigger. I think we’re just at the beginning of something really different.

Do you see now as the time to invest in storage?
That’s a very individual decision based on the economics of a household. Our goal is to make sure people have the information to make that decision. It’s going to be the right thing for a lot of people. But of course, costs will come down over time, as with any new technology.

Article published by Ecogeneration Magazine https://bit.ly/1Ha51z6

For more on Ilen and Enphase, check out this recent interview with PV Magazine - October 2015.