In a panel discussion at Solar Power International 2017 in Las Vegas, senior editor Kathie Zipp moderated a panel of commercial and residential solar contractors. The panel included Kent Harle, CEO of Stellar Solar; Scott Wiater, president and CEO of Standard Solar; and Scott Howe, SVP at Solect Energy.

Here are some experts from the panel discussion. Watch the full interview here.

Kathie Zipp: How do you see storage evolving in your markets?

Scott Howe: We do very little residential, but on the commercial side we’ve had a lot of customers interested in storage. We’ve kind of held them off because Massachusetts is going through a whole evaluation right now. They did a state of charge study that took the better part of two years. They published it and got 10 value streams. It’s all starting to come together, so we think we’re going to start seeing some incentives in the marketplace for solar-plus-storage with this new feed-in tariff. I think there’s a lot of commercial customers in our market because the demand charges are very high. Obviously there’s other things like resiliency too. If you’re in front of the meter, there’s a whole different value stream that’s going to have to be worked out with the utilities. But for us in the C&I group, we’re going to be targeting that kind of demand shedding opportunity behind the meter. With the incentives, I think commercial storage will be a pretty good market for us in the Northeast.

Kent Harle: In our market, storage is really coming on in the industrial space as costs come down. I’m glad people are out there pushing it, but we are not. We’re just kind of responding when asked until we learn more.

Scott Wiater: Standard Solar actually built the first commercial microgrid solar-plus-storage project that was fully funded through the PPA, or the value of the solar electricity and the storage mainly, and frequency response. We did that years ago and then we haven’t done one since. But I will say we’re excited about storage. I think storage looks a lot like the early days of solar, so we’re hopeful that the price curves follow what happened with solar to become viable. We were acquired by a Canadian gas company who also happens to own Green Mountain Power, the electric utility in Vermont. They’ve done quite a bit of solar with storage. They’re kind of contrary to most of the utilities. They don’t even like to call themselves a utility because they’ve done white papers that show that the storage actually is a savings to the rate base, where most of the argument from utilities is solar-plus-storage costs so much money, and it’s a hit to the rate base. It’s nice to have a sister company that we can point to that has that expertise that gives us a little bit more comfort. We’re very comfortable with it and we’re excited about the future. We just need prices to come down.