ebase...Perhaps you need to re-think your idea of a backup generator and one that is tied to a power pack for energy storage. Generac's CEO is describing a whole different scenario vs anything they have done before (and an area he's very excited about). The moment you start talking a battery pack, then a DC generator is far superior in charging it than an A/C one. Also, POLA's Heat exchanger technology is tied to their residential idea so it can be used in conjunction with heating. I'm not saying it will be huge for POLA, but don't discount it as nothing.
From Generac's last cc call:
"From the over 2 million homeowners that already have solar installed and are looking to dramatically improve the payback of their system to the millions of homeowners that want to take full control of their energy costs, while also providing added relief from short-term power outages, this new solution will be a natural fit. Although very different than the backup power space we serve today, we believe that the market creation opportunity around energy storage is very similar to what we saw with the home standby generator market nearly 20 years ago"
also from that cc call:
"The area of first interest for us is people that already have installed solar systems. There are roughly 2 million solar installations around the U.S., and only 2% of those installations actually have a battery backup system. The addition of a battery backup system has come down nicely in price over the last several years. And with the addition of that, you can dramatically improve the payback on your -- the money you've already invested in solar. And it gives you a lot more flexibility. And you couple that with Neurio's monitoring and energy management, and what you get is not only a way for people to improve the payback on their solar systems and get more control, but in it can help them actually save on their energy bills. And this is where we think the big differentiating factor between what we've done with home standby. So this is where the playbook deviates.
Home standby is all about reliability, it's about long-term outages and major outages. That's a -- and grid stability type issues. That's an industry that's fundamentally different than what we see forming here with energy management and storage. We see this as being about energy savings, we see this about -- being about the changing energy landscape that I mentioned in my prepared remarks."
"And I would say one last comment on this point. The Western part of the U.S. is where you're seeing a lot of activity around storage. That's not necessarily a strong market for us in home standby historically. Power quality is a little bit better, although recently it's kind of broken down in California because some of the issues around grid stability and issues with PG&E in particular. And PG&E made an announcement earlier this week that their grand plan for heading off wildfires is when the wind blows, they're going to shut off the grid to 5.5 million people for maybe days at that time. That could obviously develop for us into a nice home standby market because the battery is not going to get you days of backup.
But that being said, I think we can have that market is going to be a great complimentary market for us with home standby and with the storage markets to develop. And so we're going to be very focused on growing a market that, up until this point, I don't want to say we've ignored it, but it just really hasn't been there for standby. So I think it's going to be a nice complementary region of the country to what we're already doing everywhere else."
.....later in call on size of this residential power storage market: "It's forecasted to be a multibillion-dollar market very quickly. So we're really excited about it. I mean, it represents a whole new area for us, and we -- look, we've looked for a long time for kind of, I'll call it, ancillary products that we could bolt into our -- this awesome thing we built in home standby. We've looked at a lot of different things, and we just -- we haven't really found the right thing that fit naturally that didn't distract from what we were trying to be in home standby and actually fit with the channel and everything else we were trying to do in creating a market, market-creation type of activities. This energy monitoring and storage market is spot on, and it could be huge. It could be as big or bigger than home standby. And if you look at the way it's projected it could be twice the size of home standby in not too long time -- not too long of a time. So incredibly excited about."
