I’ll be honest. When a company known for installing more than 2 million backup generators for homes reached out to me for a meeting at Solar Power International 2019 last week, I was not excited. Was the company making the move to green its image, to woo new investors, or to gauge customer interest? We have seen too many legacy companies over the years dabble in clean tech with most of those roads leading to dead ends, but I figured what the heck. Let’s give it a shot. Boy was I wrong.
Walking up to the booth, the show floor around the Generac booth was abuzz over the new home energy storage product it was working on. Earlier this year, Generac acquired the residential energy storage company Pika Energy, who we first talked to at SPI last year at the Panasonic booth. Stacking onto the excitement, Generac aqui-hired the team of energy storage intelligence experts at Neurio Technology Inc. The news was exciting, but with the residential energy storage market moving as quickly as it is today, it was anyone’s guess whether Generac would be able to integrate the two new companies into the fold and translate their disparate technologies into a single set of customer-facing products quickly enough for it to matter.
We connected with Generac’s Chief Marketing Officer and president of its new clean energy business, Russ Minick, at SPI 2019, to talk about its big pivot into energy storage products to learn more about where that strategy came from. Right off the bat, Russ said that Generac had been eyeing the residential energy storage market for quite some time, but until recently, felt that, “it wasn’t worth the diversion of focus.”
“We’ve had our eye on solar and storage for some time,” but the company was really trying to hit the sweet spot in the market. “If you go in too soon, the market isn’t mature enough…if you go in too late, the leaders will already be entrenched.” In early 2019, it started dabbling with the technology, assembling a team of engineers well-versed in residential backup power solutions. After 2 or 3 months, it became clear that they were working outside their core competency and the company instead pivoted towards the prospect of an acquisition. “The ability to get a really competent product to market…would have taken too long,” Russ said.
The early efforts quickly bore fruit as Generac honed its search, performed its due diligence, and decided to acquire the energy storage intelligence experts at Neurio, and just a few weeks later, the energy storage builders at Pika Energy. “We put the teams together,” Russ said. “They’re 3,100 miles apart. One’s in Vancouver, one is in Portland, Maine. We closed, put them in a room and I got out of the way because I’m from Iowa and just let the magic happen.”
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