I think there is space in the IoT market for a micro-watt platform that harvests energy from the environment. Always on connectivity is silly if it sits idle most of the time (think monitoring systems that take a temperature and moisture readings every 15 minutes), especially if it can communicate via a low power/low bandwidth channel.

I build a system for an agriculture client like this with each node only having a very small solar panel (6in^2) and some super capacitors that kept it reporting data throughout the night. We even used performance metrics from the voltage being output by the solar panel to measure how cloudy it was. These devices reported via LoRa to a base station setup that was connected to a PoE system so we just ran a single Cat-6 STP line to a pole in the middle of the property.