Home energy management and community solar

The home's own grid, making, storing and sharing its own power

A house with solar panels on the roof makes some of its own electricity. Add a battery and an electric car, and the house becomes a small power station. It makes power, stores it, uses it and sometimes sells it. Like any power station, it needs to be controlled.

What has to be decided. A home like this faces the same questions every hour:

Should the solar power run the house, charge the battery or charge the car?
Should the home buy power from the grid now, or wait until it is cheaper?
Should it sell its spare power to the grid?

Software makes these decisions automatically. They matter because of how homes are billed. In many places, the price of grid power changes through the day. And under net metering, a home is given credit on its bill for the power it sends to the grid.

The home's own grid: software decides every hour whether the solar power runs the house, charges the battery or charges the car, and when to buy power from the grid or sell spare power back to it.

The equipment. Three kinds of products make up this market:

The smart electrical panel

Every home has an electrical panel, the box of switches where the power comes in and splits into circuits. In India it is called the distribution board. A smart panel measures each circuit and can switch it on or off from an app.

Energy data

Software reads a home's electricity bills and meter data, so that other apps can use them.

Community solar

A home without a suitable roof can buy a share in a solar plant built elsewhere. The share of power the plant produces is credited on the home's electricity bill. The people who sign up are called subscribers.

Where the market is. So far, the market is mostly American. Much of the engineering is done in Chennai and Bengaluru. The home is one part of the grid's edge. (More on it in Market Segment 40.2, Smart grid and smart meter technology.)

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

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Smart panels, energy data and community solar

Smart panels, energy data and community solar

The smart panel

SPAN

with engineers in Bengaluru, makes a smart electrical panel. It measures and controls each circuit in a house, and balances the solar panels, the battery and the car charger. Its Indian arm, SPAN India, builds its software.

Energy data and community solar

Arcadia

with engineers in Chennai, connects to customers' accounts at their electricity companies. It reads their bills and energy data, and supplies these to other companies' apps. It also runs community solar.

Perch Energy

with engineers in Chennai, signs up the subscribers of community solar plants and manages their accounts.

Trillectric, in Delhi, is another company in this area.

One company covered mainly in another Market Segment also works here:

ChargePoint

with engineers in Bengaluru and Delhi, makes chargers for homes and for fleets of electric vehicles. It has more job postings than any company covered mainly in this Market Segment. (More on it in Market Segment 38.8, EV charging networks and battery swapping, in Industry Vertical 38, Automotive and mobility.)

The house that trades power.

A home with a battery can buy power when it is cheap and sell it when it is expensive. Software can do this automatically, across thousands of homes. India's rooftop-solar programme is putting panels on millions of roofs. The next step is the software that makes those roofs part of the grid.

That is the home as its own small grid: panels, a battery and a charger, run by software that decides when to use power, store it or sell it. The market is mostly American so far, and India's rooftop-solar programme is starting to build one here.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What energy and climate tech companies hire for.

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