Integration is Key in the Future of Residential Solar 

At the NABCEP 2025 Conference, SunCast Media host Nico Johnson sat down with industry veteran and HeatSpring instructor Bill Brooks, PE to discuss what’s ahead for residential solar.

Bill brings over 30 years of experience in designing, installing, and evaluating grid-connected PV systems. With over 10,700 enrollments in his courses on HeatSpring, Bill has helped shape the next generation of solar professionals. Beyond education, he has been instrumental in developing industry standards, contributing to the National Electrical Code’s Article 690 and serving on the California Office of the State Fire Marshal’s PV Task Force – just to name a few.

In this conversation, Bill shares his vision for the future of residential solar – one where success hinges not on individual technologies, but instead on their seamless integration. As net metering policies phase out and the energy landscape evolves, the companies who master the convergence of solar, storage, electric vehicles, and intelligent power control will be the ones who succeed in the next decade.

Let’s tune into their discussion about why integration surpasses innovation. To hear the full interview, head over to SunCast Media. 

To learn more about Bill’s courses, scroll down on his instructor page. 

Transcript below.

Nico: What do you think are the keys to the future of our residential PV industry? 

Bill: I like to tell people there’s 3 technologies that are linked to PV that are going to be linked for the foreseeable future as the eye can see. Certainly one would be stationary energy storage, because we’re not going to have net metering much of anywhere in the next 10 years. It’s going to pretty much go away. So we have to be able to store for self-consumption and things like that. 

Electric vehicles are going to become a much bigger part of the process than they are right now. Not only in the way of actually being something that we get transportation from, but we use as I call it mobile energy storage. 

Mobile energy storage is the idea that I can buy a vehicle way cheaper than I can buy stationary storage. I can get a 150 kilowatt-hour truck. If I tried to buy that in a stationary storage, it would cost me twice as much. And now I got a vehicle that I can get around with. I can use my solar to power my transportation. If I have an outage at my house, I can use that for the long-term storage that I need. 

A lot of people will say, I don’t want to use up my battery and all that kind of stuff. They just don’t understand it. They haven’t really thought it through. 

I’m not going to buy an EV truck to tow my RV. That’s the dumbest thing ever. I’m going to buy a diesel that runs on biodiesel, whatever my morals are on that, to tow my RV. I’m going to use my work truck that I use for running around picking up stuff and commutes, and I’m going to use that as my backup power. So the bidirectional and various versions of bidirectional. 

You have that and then you have load control or power control systems. So that terminology, which I certainly had a hand in naming that thing – power control. Whether I was the one that named it or there’s a couple of us… and we knew when we were thinking that out, it was when we had ac-coupled batteries and we knew that the rules that I had written in the 2014 NEC for busbars and feeders and all that stuff that’s in Article 705.12 – that stuff was not going to be able to carry us into the future. It was a stepping stone. So we said, okay if you have power control, then you have control over all these things. You can basically prevent damaging conductors and busbars and things like that, and now you can put way more power on things than you were allowed to under our simpler rules.

And power control controls not only the sources, but the loads. You have to be able to dynamically operate these systems in a way that the customer is not having to interface themselves in the process, because your average customers are not nerdy like me. They’re not going to think about turning off their air conditioner or turning on this or turning off that. It’s just gotta be completely seamless to them. 

The people that integrate these four technologies: PV, stationary storage, EVs, and load control/ power control – those four things. That’s software. 

At the heart of all this stuff is good hardware that works. I’m all about stuff that works.

I don’t give a rats behind about all the cool whizzbang stuff out there. It’s got to work. I’d rather have something that’s a little bit old and clunky that works than something that’s new and whizzbang and then it’s offline half the time. It’s got to work and it’s got to be seamlessly integrated and the customer’s experience needs to be where they’re happy with their system, rather than every time I turn this on, the lights go out.

Nico: Yeah. That’s a recurring theme. I hear over the conversations I’m having, not just here at the stage. I’m trying to go around and talk to all the folks that have battery storage. The ones that I’m really impressed with are not the ones that say, technically we’re equal to Tesla, or whatever it is in terms of trying to take market share from the leaders in the market. 

The ones that impressed me are the ones who’ve really thoroughly thought through the homeowner experience at a software side. It reminds me of when Nest was introduced and it was a step change in the way homeowners interacted with their HVAC. Set it – the set point. The whole concept of it learns what your patterns are was a revolutionary change in the way that we interacted with these appliances. I feel that we’ve been on the precipice of this with PV and certainly with battery storage for a while.