Interview with Damien Phillips, Country Manager at Rexel Energy Solutions, the renewable energy division of Kellihers Electrical.
What inspired you to join the business 10 years ago, and how has that vision evolved?
I was working in a renewable energy company in Armagh, selling and project managing installations of heat pumps, biomass boilers, solar thermal systems, and solar photovoltaics (PV). We were a longstanding customer of Rexel in the UK, so the job role and the company were familiar to me, and Ireland being the small place that it is, I knew the previous Kellihers Electrical Branch Manager in Dundalk through my local GAA club. The initial job scope was to establish a Solar PV distribution arm of Kellihers Electrical, from scratch, and that both excited and daunted me! The Irish market was tiny and had little or no government support back in 2015. I had great mentorship from Jerry Hamilton, the head of Energy Solutions for Rexel in Northern Europe. Jerry taught me the importance of selecting the right suppliers and products, with a view to long term partnerships. From day one I have opted to work with manufacturers that wanted to grow the market in Ireland and were committed to the Irish market for the long haul.
Can you share a memorable moment from the early days of RES that stands out to you?
Solar PV in the early days, for a distributor, was mainly new build installations. Roofers and joiners would not have been familiar with PV mounting components, so most days were spent driving around building sites and teaching tradesmen in portacabins or up on scaffolding. Thankfully, Solar PV is mainstream now, and we get great training support from our manufacturers, particularly Van der Valk.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in the first few years, and how did you overcome them?
Almost every call with a new contact was an educational session. The knowledge on Solar PV was extremely limited, so photovoltaics had to be explained before it could be sold. This involved spending a lot of time with consultants, engineers, and architects, plus roofers and electricians. I suppose what I have always tried to do, is to demystify Solar PV. When it is stripped back to its fundamentals Solar PV is not that complicated, and we always encourage electrical contractors to get PV on their own house and live with it, it is one of the best ways to learn. The same goes for Electric Vehicle charging.
How has the business changed over the 10 years, and what do you attribute that growth to?
There is a lot more of everything! More installers, more homes and businesses with PV and EV chargers, more distributors, and more manufacturers. Ireland was very late in European terms, to the Solar PV party, but has benefitted from cheaper established technology. The huge growth in Ireland can be attributed to the cost of technology dropping, at the same time electricity prices and government support was rising. People like to see a payback, even though a ten-year payback is way better than what you’d get in a bank, that drop to a 4-to-6-year payback has really brought PV on leaps and bounds.
What are you most proud of achieving in the past decade?
Rexel Ireland has 24 branches; in the very early days Solar PV and EV Charging was concentrated on our branches in Cork, Ballymount and Dundalk. We now have comprehensive stock in all our main locations and a high level of knowledge in those branches.
Rexel has invested in its people, and supported by manufacturers such as Huawei, Astronergy and Van der Valk, we continue to grow the level of knowledge in our network. It goes back to ‘demystifying’ PV and EV charging, to make these technologies mainstream amongst Rexel Ireland installer customers, we first needed to make it mainstream in our own business. I am proud, that from a standing start, our Energy Solutions division now accounts for over 20% of Rexel Ireland’s business.
How have your relationships with customers changed over the years, and what do you value most about those relationships?
Our installer customers seem to have a lot more pressures on their time now than back in 2015, a lot less of our interactions are face-to-face, but I am sure this is partly down to Covid-related societal changes and improvements in technology. More than ever, it is vital that we carry the right stock, in the right quantities in all our key locations, as our customers rely on us to back them up. Our new Distribution Centre and forthcoming e-Commerce platform will undoubtedly bring us to the next level in terms of customer service.
I have plenty of installer customers that have been with me since day one in 2015, and it has been fantastic to watch some of them grow from one or two men in a van, to massive multi-location companies, and nationwide installers. I would like to think we have helped them along the way, and we have plenty of in-house experience to help today’s small installer reach that next level (whatever that may be).
Our customer relationships are key to what we do, they place a lot of trust in us to get things right, not just on a once-off basis, but again and again. Every installation business operates slightly differently, and has different demands on our time and services, it is our job to take the time to understand those needs and adapt the best we can.
How has the industry changed in the last decade, and how has your company adapted to those changes?
Solar PV systems had a relatively small number of components back in the last decade, and EV Chargers were glorified outdoor sockets. We have moved on from that, on residential systems. hybrid ‘battery-ready’ inverters far outsell basic string inverters. Optimisers, smart meters, energy diverters, load balancing systems, and smart EV chargers are now supplied almost as standard.
We have seen a huge growth in energy storage systems, Huawei batteries are very popular, and we have had to build a dedicated storage area in our national distribution centre just for batteries.
What innovations or new services/products are you most excited about for the future?
The advent of recent storms has resulted in a big increase in requests for grid backup systems, or inverters with off-grid backup built in. Unfortunately, climate change may mean these storms become a more regular occurrence, Solar PV and Energy Storage Systems will have a part to play in mitigating these impacts.
In the future I hope to see Ireland’s smart meter roll out lead to meaningful changes for homes and businesses. Dynamic pricing and agile tariffs would allow electricity consumers to shift their consumption to cheaper and greener time slots, Rexel already has the technology to help users do this, we need the government policy, grid operators, and utility companies to catch up with their European counterparts. Premises with batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicles would greatly benefit from such tariffs, and at the end of the day – it just makes sense.
Rexel has been at the forefront of ‘electrification’ across Europe, North America, and Australia, and we look forward to being a big part of it in Ireland for many more years.