What’s already happening across the Atlantic — and the lessons from two installers who’ve lived the transition
In Europe right now, EVs are outselling gas cars for the first time. IKEA is offering dynamic electricity rates bundled with solar and heat pumps. Octopus Energy will lease you an electric vehicle from the same company that installs your solar panels and supplies your electricity. And a new generation of installers has moved so far past “just solar” that storage is nearly a universal attachment, not a premium add-on.
At Aurora’s Empower conference, Toni Werner from Germany’s EKD (Energiekonzepte Deutschland), Sebastian Blake from Octopus Energy, and Barry Cinnamon of Cinnamon Energy Systems sat down to talk through what that world looks like in practice, how it’s already arriving in parts of the US, and what it actually takes to build a business around it.
What Europe Is Already Selling
Walk through the website of EKD, one of Germany’s largest solar installers, and you’ll find solar, batteries, EV chargers, heat pumps, energy management systems, and dynamic electricity tariffs. Octopus Energy in the UK will bundle the hardware, installation, financing, and electricity tariff into a single offer. Their most striking product, Zero Bills Homes, partners with homebuilders to install solar and battery systems sized to guarantee that a fully electrified new home pays zero electricity bills for at least five years.
“We model the needs of a new build, fully electrified home — no gas connection, heat pump for heating and cooling — and understand how much solar and battery we’d need to be confident that home will generate more value than it costs us to supply,” said Sebastian Blake, head of product at Octopus Energy. The hardware cost rolls into the mortgage. The homeowner gets a $0 bill every month and never has to think about it.
The thread running through all of it is a concept that’s still emerging in the US: the home energy management system, or HEMS. In Europe, a HEMS acts as the conductor — managing solar production, battery storage, EV charging, and heat pump operation in real time, shifting loads to when electricity is cheapest or grid demand is lowest.
Toni Werner describes it as a Swiss Army knife for energy: “It doesn’t matter if the homeowner has an EV at the moment or a heat pump at the moment. Our HEMS is a platform. When you want to drive an EV in the future, no problem. When you want to change your heating system, no problem.”
When all the pieces work together, the homeowner is more self-sufficient, pays less for energy, and has locked in resilience against the price swings and geopolitical disruptions that are becoming the background noise of energy markets everywhere.
Diversifying Beyond Solar
For US installers, the natural question is how to get there without breaking what you’ve already built. Both Barry and Toni gave unusually candid answers to that question.
Barry Cinnamon: crawl, then walk, then run — and expect it to take years.
Barry Cinnamon has been in solar since 2001. Cinnamon Energy Systems started adding batteries about ten years ago when the California incentives made the math work. EV chargers and panel upgrades followed. Then, about five years ago, the hardest and most consequential move: HVAC.
His first attempt at HVAC expansion was a referral arrangement with a local contractor. It worked, but the economics were thin. The second version was a wholesale markup model. Better margins, but by the time everyone made money, the price to the customer wasn’t competitive. The third version — hiring his own crews, getting the licenses, building out sales and service — is what finally worked. “That’s even harder, but then the profitability is there.”
The lesson he draws for anyone starting out: don’t try to replicate what you see in Europe overnight. “I would just recommend to installers in the US to crawl first. Find a good AC or heat pump system that you or your partners are familiar with. Find a few good battery systems and see what you can do there.” The cross-selling opportunity is real — Barry now runs seminars where existing solar customers come in interested in heat pumps, and HVAC customers leave with battery quotes — but it takes time to build the brand and the service infrastructure that make it sustainable.
Toni Werner: failing fast is still failing.
EKD’s story is a useful counterpoint. They tried to build an in-house heat pump operation early, with good people and good intentions — and it didn’t work. “We had good colleagues, but we never got the process flying,” Toni said. The mistake wasn’t ambition; it was underestimating how different heat pump installation is from solar. Different planning requirements, different customer service demands, different failure modes.
EKD’s current model is a partner network: sales reps can choose which heat pump partner is best suited for a given project, hand it off at the right point, and stay focused on what they do well — selling and planning solar and HEMS. “Now it’s not our problem,” Toni said of the service complexity. “We can concentrate on our core process.”
Barry summed up the shared experience well: “You gotta have four wheels on the car and they all have to be working. We’d put three wheels on and try to put the fourth one on, and then the second wheel would break. Very, very hard to get everything working smoothly from sales and marketing to installation to customer service to support.”
The Market Structure Challenge
One thing that makes the European comparison complicated is the regulatory environment. Sebastian Blake, who moved from building Octopus Energy’s flexibility products in the UK to running them in Texas, describes the US as having three distinct markets: regulated, deregulated, and what Barry calls “poorly regulated.”
Texas is the closest analog to Europe — a liberalized retail electricity market where innovative bundled offers are already showing up. Octopus launched PowerStore there, a $0-down battery offer that bundles hardware, installation, financing, and optimization into a single monthly payment. The optimization is what makes the economics work: Octopus re-dispatches customer batteries against wholesale market prices, sometimes 50 times a day in the UK, squeezing flexibility value that gets passed back to consumers as lower rates.
Most of the US doesn’t look like Texas. In California and other regulated markets, the investor-owned utilities have significant influence over the regulatory process, and the incentive structures often favor utility profit over customer savings. Barry is direct about it: “You just have to be very careful about filtering out what’s good for the utilities versus what’s good for you and your customers.”
The structural fix — open standards, interoperability between hardware systems, flexibility markets that reward customer-side assets — is still being built. Sebastian points to Bluetooth as the right model: an industry-wide protocol that nobody owns and everyone benefits from. “That’s the world we’d love to get to,” he said.
What to Do to Prepare
The full European vision — HEMS orchestrating solar, batteries, heat pumps, and EVs against dynamic tariffs, with zero-bills financing and open interoperability — is not arriving in most US markets next year. But the direction is clear, and the installers building toward it now will be better positioned when it does.
A few things the panel pointed toward for installers thinking about next steps: start with products where the sales motion is closest to what you already know — batteries and EV chargers before heat pumps. Build partner relationships before building in-house capacity, so you can offer the bundle without bearing the full operational risk. Invest in service infrastructure early, because in whole home electrification, service relationships are how you cross-sell. And watch what’s happening in Texas as a preview of where deregulated markets are heading.
The underlying trend driving all of it is a grid that is 100 years old and not built for the demand that’s coming — from EVs, data centers, electrified heating, and everything else. That’s a problem for utilities to solve, but it creates a durable opportunity for the installers who know how to work around it.
“You can embargo oil,” Michael Ludwig noted, “but you can’t embargo the sun.”
Watch the Full Session On Demand
This post captures the highlights, but the full conversation goes further — including a deeper look at HEMS in practice, the Zero Bills Homes model, how dynamic tariffs actually work, and what V2X (vehicle-to-everything) means for installer businesses in the next few years. The full Empower session is available on demand.
Watch the Empower Beyond Panels Session →
This post is based on a panel session from Aurora Solar’s Empower conference, featuring Toni Werner (EKD), Sebastian Blake (Octopus Energy), and Barry Cinnamon (Cinnamon Energy Systems), moderated by Michael Ludwig, Aurora Solar.