What to learn from Ronald Coase about the demise of Giv Energy
There are two competing visions for the electrified home (firm)
The demise of Giv Energy a few weeks ago was a sad moment. A British assembler, creating products tailored especially from a market and software perspective to the British market.
In the days following the administration announcement, a recurrent theme on my social media was from concerned customers and installers wondering what to do to manage the cloud and software interface.
This got me thinking, because it introduces a whole dimension of risk to the purchase of expensive retrofit items. The same logic would apply as neatly to a heat-pump or EV Charger manufacturer. Without the cloud, these devices are less user friendly. Optimisation routines break, access becomes impossible except perhaps on the home wifi network. Access reverts to an ugly web console, or an API. Either way, not everyone would share my geeky enthusiasm for controlling their heat-pump via MQTT (HomeAssistant is great at this by the way), or their Battery via MCP (again Victron is great at this!).
The risk is salient for Government. Much of the upfront cost of heat-pump and PV/batteries is being underwritten by grants and tax-breaks. It’s not in the taxpayers interest to invest in technologies that are at risk of obsolescence is a manufacturer goes to the wall, nor should a reasonable optimisation and running pattern require someone as technology literate as myself to keep control on running costs.
Which comes onto another value-perception problem, as most users are reluctant to pay ongoing subscriptions for hardware. The reality is maintaining a secure online cloud 24x7, ingesting data from devices over the cloud, maintaining and supporting user apps or websites, and running bespoke forecasting algorithms does bear a cost. But users either put a low value on these or expect them to be included in perpetuity.
What solutions are there?
