By Michael Brooks

NRG Energy will continue to focus on its residential solar and renewable energy technology businesses, despite posting losses of $53 million and $163 million in those units respectively in 2014, company executives said in an earnings call Friday.

Those losses — and another $981 million in losses in the “corporate” segment, which includes international business and electric vehicle services — were offset by net income of more than $1 billion in NRG Business, the  unit that primarily serves businesses and includes the company’s generation assets. Total net income for the company in 2014 was $134 million ($0.23/share), compared to a loss of $386 million in 2013.

CEO David Crane said the industry was undergoing a paradigm shift, and that the company’s investments in renewables now would pay off in the long run.

“Our industry is in the early but unmistakable stage of a technology-driven disruption of historic proportion,” Crane told investors Friday. “This disruption ultimately is going to end in a radically transformed energy industry where the winners are going to be those who offer their customers, whether they be commercial, industrial or individual customers, a seamless energy solution that is safer, cleaner, more reliable, more convenient and increasingly wireless.”

According to Kelcy Pegler Jr., president of NRG Home Solar, the company ended 2014 with 13,000 total residential solar customers, 9,000 of which were gained that year. NRG has a goal of adding 22,000 to 27,000 more by the end of 2015.

“It’s our view at NRG that traditional centralized energy service models are significantly at risk,” said Steve McBree, president of NRG Home, the parent of Home Solar. “We believe that the future eventually will belong to demand-driven decentralized models of service that empower individual consumers.”

Responding to an analyst’s question about upcoming Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon emissions from existing power plants, Crane said NRG was not worried. “As long as the rules imposed are imposed in a fair and reasonable way, tightening environmental regulations actually enhance us relative to our competition,” he said. According to its year-end earnings filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has a goal to reduce its carbon emissions 90% by 2050.

Q4 Results

The company posted a $119 million profit for the fourth quarter of 2014, after reporting a $297 million loss in the same period of 2013.

Analysts were less than thrilled, however. The quarterly earnings amounted to 21 cents per share, far less than the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research of 93 cents.

Zacks said NRG’s Goal Zero product, a portable solar panel used to charge mobile devices, would attract more customers and help it retain existing ones, but that the company’s reliance on weather conditions was concerning. During the call, Chief Operating Officer Mauricio Gutierrez said, “The recent cold front in the northeast once again proved the value of our diversified portfolio, where unlike gas generation, our coal and oil assets benefited from spikes in gas and power prices. Our strategy is to extend the life of our assets and maintain a cheap option in energy that can benefit from short-term dislocations in the market like the ones we experienced the past two winters.”