Just returned from Solar Power International in Anaheim... what a show! Twice the size than last year, almost 1000 exhibitors, and more visitors from more places around the world than one can count.

The unfortunate twist... efficiency and conservation tend to get overlooked - again. I talked to a few exhibitors about what they do in terms of aiding their customers to save energy in parallel with implementing solar systems. Not only do they say, well, not our specialty, but some of them really don't want to hear about it: since saving energy is often less expensive than generating it, for a solar installer to educate their customer can very well mean selling a smaller system. Tricky, huh?

From a NegaWatt perspective, some good news as well. We identified a vendor with universal power measurement hardware that is very suitable for integration with our monitoring package. So we are now able to provide an end-to-end monitoring solution for electricity usage and (solar) electricity generation that will work no matter what your inverter, electricity meter, etc.

We are also excited to report that we have started discussions with several solar controller manufacturers about bundling or branding our monitoring solution for them. Our solution is very competitive in terms of price and features, so we are confident that this is the beginning of some exciting partnerships.