Business View Magazine | June 2019

381 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JUNE 2019 BVM: How are renewable energies, such as solar, impacting your company’s product line? Stiebel: “The market for thermal solar products has been pretty much the same for the last two or three years. We have a lot of other products we’re focusing on more because the solar thermal market seems to be stagnating. There’s a big difference between solar thermal and photovoltaics. Just to clarify, we are just in the solar thermal arena, we are not involved in solar PV. I think there’s still a sizeable market in California with tens of thousands of solar thermal systems getting installed each year, but the market has shrunk in the rest of the country. We only sold a few hundred solar storage tanks in the U.S. last year.” Wetherby: “Stiebel Eltron, at this point, is using a lot of water heating technologies. Thermal solar is one of them, but it’s not the largest at this moment. We continue to offer a full line of water heating products and are able to integrate the majority of them into any kind of project where our array is required. Ten years ago, there were a lot of statewide programs to promote solar thermal and PV and I think the utility companies contributed a fair amount of money into the rebate pot, but solar thermal didn’t take off as much as they’d like. So, now the federal programs are declining; scheduled to phase out by 2021. It’s interesting, in 2012, I went to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, which is owned by the federal government but staffed by outside contractors. In the entire complex, which is quite state-of-the-art from a building science standpoint – solar, wind power, biofuels – there is no demonstrated solar thermal technology, which is quite strange. We call it solar thermal because we’re transferring the heat of the sun to water or glycol, and then using it to heat either domestic hot water or fluids for space heating” Stiebel: “Domestic hot water heat pumps, which we also manufacture, are replacing solar thermal. Gas-fired water heaters are also maintaining market share in certain areas because the price ST I EBEL ELTRON