Customers Hold Keys to Growth of Turnkey Energy as a Service Solution Providers

A recent Guidehouse Insights blog highlights how corporate commercial and industrial (C&I) energy and sustainability managers are choosing to apply new technology and business model innovations to meet their energy management and sustainability needs. These new customer choices are giving rise to the growth of energy as a service (EaaS) solutions. Guidehouse Insights’ recently released report on the evolution of EaaS defines specific solutions that make up a comprehensive EaaS solution offering:

• Energy portfolio advisory solutions: Comprehensive, enterprisewide strategic guidance to help customers navigate their unique procurement, energy management, financing, business model, and technology opportunities across all energy management and sustainability needs
• Onsite energy supply: Distributed generation solutions like solar PV, combined heat and power, diesel and natural gas gensets, microturbines, and fuel cells that improve energy supply
• Offsite energy supply: Including electricity procurement options from offsite sources in retail choice deregulated electricity and gas markets and from emerging large-scale, offsite renewable energy procurement business models
• Energy efficiency and building optimization solutions: Comprehensive energy efficiency assessment, business case analysis, financing, implementation, monitoring and verification, and building commissioning services to reduce energy spend and use
• Load management and optimization solutions: Comprehensive, end-to-end energy management solutions to optimize energy supply, demand, and load at the site and enterprisewide, including demand response (DR), distributed energy storage, microgrid controls, electric vehicle charging equipment, and building energy management and building automation systems and software controls

Turnkey Solutions to Drive Growth

C&I customers that begin to take advantage of these new solutions will increasingly look to turnkey solutions providers that can provide not only strategic advice across their property portfolios, but execution expertise as well. The key driver to enabling the growth of turnkey EaaS solutions vendors will be the ability to deliver comprehensive financing solutions to help customers avoid spending capital on energy projects. However, there are two additional drivers that vendors who are considering creating and delivering turnkey EaaS solutions will need to consider:

• Historically, C&I customers have needed multiple regional partners to manage even a portion of their energy management needs. Turnkey EaaS vendors seeking to address C&I customers’ portfolio-wide needs for EaaS will require widely trained and deeply experienced advisory capabilities to address their customers’ complex energy procurement, financing, and technology deployment needs. For example, in the United States, a turnkey provider will need to have the depth of regional expertise under one roof necessary to address customer strategic needs in diverse energy markets and climate zones like Texas, California, New York, the Southeast, or the Midwest.
• Experienced C&I energy and sustainability managers have endured years of disappointment from energy use and cost reduction claims that never materialized. Moreover, many of these managers have still not yet even tried to reduce energy spend. What C&I customers truly want is guaranteed lower energy costs, whether from solar PV, energy storage, energy efficiency, or DR. Vendors that blend execution expertise across all EaaS solutions with financing tools to guarantee cost savings through a single point of sale will be best positioned.

To date, with customer-sited distributed energy resources, too much emphasis has been placed on trying to figure out where to sell technology outside of a focus on solving customer problems. For turnkey EaaS vendors, market growth will not necessarily be led on a technology-first basis. For at-scale revenue generation, these vendors should start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. Guidehouse Insights anticipates that vendors that place a keen eye on how to bring turnkey, customer-focused EaaS solutions into the market through a trusted, single point of contact with a financed savings guarantee will be at a competitive advantage.