Home batteries like the Tesla Powerwall are nice, but what about people who can’t afford them, or renters who aren’t allowed to install them, or people who just don’t want the hassle of dealing with a permit and an electrician? A company called Pila is selling small (1.6 kWh) batteries that simply plug into a normal electrical socket. They can serve as backup for a refrigerator or other appliance in the event of a blackout, but they can also “mesh” with one another to form a network, pair with rooftop solar, or participate in VPP programs. CEO Cole Ashman explains the value proposition.
Here on Volts we’ve done a lot of coverage of the burgeoning category of “plug-in DERs” (distributed energy resources). Sometimes called “permissionless DERs,” these are the clean energy technologies you can just plug in whenever you like, with no permits and no interconnection agreements. Back in November 2025 we talked about balcony solar. In June we looked at small batteries that a company drops into businesses for free and pays for out of electricity bill savings.
Today it’s small residential batteries, for houses and apartments — not the big ones, like the Tesla Powerwall, but wee batteries you can sneak into a corner of your living room or kitchen. There are lots of players crowding into this space — Blip Energy, WATTS, EcoFlow, Jackery, Anker, the list goes on — but the one that’s gotten the most attention from the tech press is Pila Energy, which sells a 1.6-kWh battery meant to back up your appliances.
I’ll confess that I’m a little skeptical about this niche — not because I don’t love batteries, y’all know I love batteries — but because they’re converging from every side. Distribution-scale batteries, full-sized home batteries, EV batteries, batteries getting embedded in stoves and air conditioners. Is there room left in the middle?
To hear the case, I’m talking with Cole Ashman, founder and CEO of Pila. We’re going to get into what these batteries are for, what they cost, what they can do for the grid, and who’s actually buying them.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
02:26 – Lessons from Powerwall and Span
05:33 – What Pila is and how it works
07:14 – How long a fridge runs on one battery
09:28 – Fire risk, LFP chemistry, and New York City
16:02 – Why the price went up, and cost per kilowatt hour
19:55 – Who is actually buying Pila
23:00 – Financing models and free batteries
27:04 – Do the bill savings add up?
32:05 – Why utilities want small batteries in VPPs
36:58 – Pilots with Holy Cross Energy and Brooklyn SolarWorks
41:09 – Solar pairing and the Pila mesh network
47:14 – Camping batteries and built-in storage
54:19 – Utilities and visibility at the grid edge
55:58 – Bidirectional outlets and the next five years
1:00:10 – Clean energy as invisible infrastructure
Resources
People & Organizations
Company & Industry News
Topics Discussed
FDNY - Energy Storage System Equipment Approval and Installation Guide
Pila Energy Launches First Plug-In Path to Home Battery Storage in New York City
Related Volts Episodes
Transcript
David Roberts: All right then. With no further ado, Cole Ashman, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Cole Ashman: Thanks, David. It’s great to be here. I’m excited to dive in.
David Roberts: Yeah. So let’s get right into it then. You worked at Powerwall. You worked on the Powerwall at Tesla, and you worked at Span. I think, Volts listeners might remember an episode I did with Span years ago, the very high-end sort of replacement for your electricity panel. Both those products are quite beautiful, highly engineered, expensive, and they require an electrician to install. So I’m just curious, what did you learn from those? What inspired you to go off and make a product that’s easier to install?
Cole Ashman: Yeah. Well, you sort of nailed it there. You know, easier is the operative word. And Powerwall and Span, I mean, these are incredible products. Like you said, they’re beautiful. They do a lot for your home in terms of backup power, quantifying, and lowering the cost of your electricity bill. But I think if we score ourselves in this industry against the deployment numbers, you know, it’s not awesome.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: If you look back at the last decade, there’s still fewer than 1% of US homes that have any large whole home battery-
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: whether that’s Tesla, Enphase, Franklin, Base. And maybe just to give a little bit more color on my background here, you know, the role that I played on the Powerwall team was equal parts new product development and deployment-focused.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: So said another way, I spent about half of my time in Palo Alto working with the smartest engineers in the world, and then the other half of my time I was sweating in garages with electricians across the US, and Australia, and Europe. And you know, Tesla was uniquely trying to solve the deployment problem and the cost associated with deployment because we’d acquired SolarCity.
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: And we were equal parts installer and product company. So, you know, have been focused on those challenges for a really long time. And, you know, I don’t think anyone would disagree that backup power is becoming a necessity, and if you live on the coasts especially, power prices are going up, you know, and that need is growing. Batteries are a great solution for that. We just haven’t really solved the deployment. We haven’t solved the how do we get this into homes quickly problem, and that’s what Pila is all about. We’re bringing forward all of the learnings from this last generation of big centralized projects that, you know, started off as accessories to rooftop solar-
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: and have still kind of carried forward that deployment model of electrician installed, permitted, complex, works for a single family home, you know, maybe around $15,000 to $50,000 big upgrade. We’re carrying all of the best parts of that, but then also trying to bring in some of what we’ve learned from other product categories collectively. You know, the home audio space, the internet connectivity story-
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: in buildings, which largely looks modular, self-installed, and way simpler. So that’s it in a nutshell. We’re making it simpler. We’re trying to meet people where they’re at and not losing out on this amazing infrastructure grade value that these batteries have for the grid.
David Roberts: So then just tell us then, what is Pila? Lay out the product. What is it exactly? What is it, how big is it? What does it do?
Cole Ashman: Awesome. So maybe before talking about the battery that we have, I’ll say broadly, Pila is building the distributed control layer for power inside homes and buildings, and the physical product today is a plug-in battery. It’s kind of battery plus compute node. It plugs into a normal wall outlet, 120 volts. You know, it takes 30 seconds to set up, and then the appliance plugs into Pila.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: Your fridge, your window AC, network equipment, big things like sump pumps, whatever you care about. And on its own, that battery nodes gives you automatic backup and energy management. And when the grid goes down, it isolates that appliance, it keeps it running. And when the grid is up, it can charge when electricity is cheap or from excess solar, and discharge that stored energy into the load when power is expensive. But the most interesting thing happens when you add a second or a third one or more. These battery plus compute nodes, they discover each other over what we call the Pila mesh network.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: And they start behaving like one local energy system. So instead of a big single battery in the garage or equipment room that’s trying to understand the entire house from the meter level, we are distributing storage and sensing and compute room by room and appliance by appliance. So sometimes what I think of what we’re building as is kind of a very high capability virtual power plant behind the meter, a local control,
David Roberts: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: a local resilience layer that then presents the entire home and building upstream as a coordinated resource.
David Roberts: All right. We’re gonna get into a lot of those things, but I think one thing that a lot of people just ask, I think first, is like, “Well, how long will my refrigerator run?” Like, if my refrigerator’s plugged into the battery, people, you know, you can say 1.6 kilowatt hours, but I don’t know that that means a ton to people. Like, a refrigerator, if the power goes out, how long will a refrigerator run on one of these if it’s fully charged?
Cole Ashman: Fully charged, typically over 24 hours.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: And of course, like every fridge is a little different.
David Roberts: Yeah, of course.
Cole Ashman: The thing is, we are really good at answering that question in the moment because we live... And it’s like an Apple Watch for your refrigerator. We’re learning all of its vitals over time, and we actually present that as a really clear, you know, number on our, a screen on the device in the outage. Like, “Hey, you’ve got exactly 27 hours, and-”
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: “...you know, you just ran your tea kettle as well in the kitchen, and now that’s dropped to 23 hours.”
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: So, you know, broadly the design is about a day of backup for something like a fridge.
David Roberts: Got it.
Cole Ashman: But in the event, you know, you actually get a really, really clear answer to that question.
David Roberts: Got it. And you’ve been shipping these products since about mid-2026. Where are they mostly? Are you shipping nationally now? Are they available everywhere? What’s the geography?
Cole Ashman: We are shipping nationally. They’re available in all 50 states, and we’ve had just an incredible feedback from customers. I mean, we’ve got a backlog currently that’s way bigger than we can fulfill, and we’re working on getting those batches built and ramping up mass manufacturing. But the amazing thing is it’s something that’s drop shippable. So we manufacture it and we send it right to folks, and that’s kind of the whole story. Different from the weeks of back and forth with contractors and construction that you’d otherwise have to go through.
David Roberts: And just give people a sense of how physically big it is. Just, I don’t know what the right comparison... Bigger than a VCR? What-
Cole Ashman: Yeah. It’s-
David Roberts: That’s a terrible comp. Nobody has VCRs anymore. I don’t know why that came to my mind, but like, how big is it?
Cole Ashman: Well, it is kind of funny because we see people putting these in their media consoles, you know? So sort of like this empty space with the advent of smart TVs that the battery’s kind of perfect for. It’s, let’s call it 1980s VCR or briefcase size.
David Roberts: Yeah. Okay, got it, got it. All right, so that’s the product. I think people’s first question about this, which I’m sure you have answered a trillion times, but must be dealt with, is, let’s just talk safety first.
When people think “You want me to put a lithium-ion battery in my house, what about fires? What about lithium-ion battery,” especially in like, you know, a place like New York City, apartment in New York City, you know, New York City has had these lithium-ion battery fires from e-bikes all over the place, and there’s a lot of hype about it. They’re very, their fire department’s very sensitive to it. So people, I think, have ambiently absorbed this general fear about fires. So tell us about fire and safety, and what is the sort of like certifications.
Cole Ashman: Yeah, safety is incredibly important. I’m glad we’re spending time on it. We’ve spent countless engineering hours, you know, focusing on this question. And yeah, those damn e-bikes. You know, I think that is-
David Roberts: Truly.
Cole Ashman: Well, I mean, we, I think we have to call a spade a spade. Like, not every battery pack is created equally.
David Roberts: Sure.
Cole Ashman: The ones that tend to cause trouble are these low-cost, high-power density NMC, NCA chemistries that are designed to be lightweight and super energy dense and, you know, let’s be honest, often value engineered where they’re pulling out, you know, potentially things that could help improve the safety margins. Not to mention these things are used, abused all around the city-
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: you know, in the e-bike kind of context. So, you know, that is real, but our story in this has been safety focused from the beginning. And I’ll give a few bullet points, and you can, you and the viewers and the listeners can kind of judge for yourself. But the story starts with a different chemistry. So we use lithium iron phosphate, LFP-
David Roberts: Yep.
Cole Ashman: which is the same chemistry that goes into power tools and honestly most home batteries now, because it’s, while a bit heavier, it is generally considered significantly safer. We also work with tier one cell suppliers that, you know, work with the best in the industry because they know what they’re doing. On top of that, we wrap it in all kinds of real-time sensing and analytics with the battery management system that’s watching out for every possible anomaly down to the individual cell level.
And, you know, we back this up by doing the most intensive safety certifications that one can do around this type of product, including ones that are generally not done for the kind of camping batteries, which are also that, you know, same chemistry as the portable e-bike stuff. So we put our system through the paces and, you know, you basically have to do that. You have to try and push the thing into a thermal runaway and make sure that even in that scenario, it is safe.
So we’ve done that. We’ve cleared those bars. Wouldn’t be shipping if we hadn’t. And then, you know, I’ll take it one step further, and I’ll leave it there. A lot of the concern with battery thermal events, as the industry will call them, is a propagation risk. You know, one thing happens to a cell, and then you have cascading failure.
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: For the built environment, our view on this is by distributing storage, you actually reduce the risk profile-
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: by not having one giant system in the basement equipment room, you know, that might even-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: be below grade and flood risk to, you know, more spread out and reducing that sort of risk. But it’s a very real thing. You spend a lot of engineering and hours and a lot of money solving this problem, and the goal is to get to something that’s as absolutely safe as possible. We are very proud and we stand behind the system that we’ve built, but I never shy away from answering that question.
David Roberts: Yeah. Is there a UL listing or certification? I have only the vaguest understanding of the various levels of UL certification
Cole Ashman: There’s UL, there is shipping certifications, there’s a whole host of them, and by and large, we test to the same core set of UL standards that something like a Powerwall would.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: The end product standard is a little different because, you know, Powerwall is not a plug-in product, but the battery safety testing stuff looks almost identical to what you’d see in those, you know, large kind of professionally installed systems.
David Roberts: And specifically in New York City, I know their fire department is very jumpy. Are you sort of classified as a consumer appliance or as an energy storage system officially in New York City for regulatory purposes?
Cole Ashman: The truth is, it is a bit of a gray area.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: And we’ve been having conversations with FDNY and the building department and, you know, really, we want to be a partner in answering these questions because, let’s be honest, the cat’s out of the bag. People are putting these batteries out and around the city.
In some cases, they’re camping batteries. In some cases, they’re cobbling things together. Eh. And I think that might be the bigger risk in all of this is that if people are not using UL-certified batteries designed for the job, what are they using?
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: You know, and what’s, what does the risk look like there? So to answer the question directly, we do not list today as an energy storage system because that’s not how that current generation of product standard is written, and this was true at Span and Tesla. We spent a lot of time in the world of UL and NEC code making processes to help re-zhuzh standards and upgrade them as the products change, and that’s always how it goes, you know?
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: The product innovation tends to lead the standards that wrap around them.
David Roberts: But you’re not worried at all that you’re gonna get classified as a energy storage system and thus come under a bunch of new restrictions or regulations like, as a business worry, you’re not worried about that?
Cole Ashman: No, and because we’ve built the product to clear those bars already.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: Sure, there might be some paperwork risk in doing that, but we know that the product clears the same safety margins that some of these other systems do. And actually, we’re better in some areas because a lot of the concern comes down to, in New York, comes down to knowing where these things are and understanding how they operate.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: You know, so like we have cellular radio in every battery, and we can, you know, reliably monitor and answer that question, which is a feather in our cap. And I think, to the extent we’ve begun engaging, those sort of things go a long way to building comfort. Again, it’s a bit of a gray area, but we are not worried about the business risk, and we’re excited to go push this forward.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: You know, we think it’s, cat is already out of the bag, and somebody needs to be a good shepherd of bringing this into the world.
David Roberts: All right, let’s talk price. Your pre-orders back in March 2025 were $1,000. Today it’s $1,500. Why is the price going up? And is it ever going to come down?
Cole Ashman: Yeah, I mean, we are an early stage business, so we absolutely have to focus on making a product that, we aren’t, losing money on as we sell. The really short answer, which is maybe interesting to some, maybe not, is supply chains and, you know, I hate to point fingers at the data centers, but-
David Roberts: Oh, go ahead. Everybody else is...
Cole Ashman: We’ve seen Apple raise their prices on their laptops and I think the base MacBook went from $1,299 to $1,499. Chips have gotten expensive. Supply chain is COVID level crazy right now.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: But we’re optimistic. You know, the amazing thing about this product is the cost to produce and deliver and connect it to your home and the grid comes down very predictably because it’s a mass manufacturing story.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: We aren’t unwinding installer economics and permits and truck rolls and these things which have proven really hard to compress cost on in the whole home batteries. So the point where now most of the cost, like over 50% of the cost of a whole home battery system is not the hardware. So there’s absolutely reason to be optimistic. We have a pretty steep cost down plan that is not gonna compromise on any of the quality or safety, but just comes from building and shipping tons and tons of these directly.
David Roberts: Scale mostly.
Cole Ashman: Exactly.
David Roberts: Yeah, and I mean, presumably supply chains won’t be as borked as they are forever, although it’s kinda hard looking out to know when that’s gonna resolve itself.
Cole Ashman: Yeah, it’s an ebb and a flow.
David Roberts: You have said that half the price of a bigger battery is the install, but as I’m sort of doing the math here, on a per kilowatt hour basis, it looks to me like a Pila battery has roughly the same per kilowatt hour cost as an installed Powerwall. Like a $1,500 for 1.6 kilowatt hours, that’s, it’s somewhere around $930, $940 a kilowatt hour. And if you do the math on a Powerwall 3, it’s in that same zone, so it’s not clear to me that the energy, the per unit energy cost is any lower.
Cole Ashman: It’s not. I mean, you’ve hit on something that I think is pretty unintuitive at face value until you understand that landed cost of these whole home systems is incredibly driven by soft cost.
And by cutting out soft cost by design, you know, this wasn’t something we accidentally stumbled into, this was the mission of the company is in order to scale these assets grid-wide, you know, if you believe the power grid of the future gets balanced at its edges because that’s where control is most actionable-
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: and data fidelity is highest, then the edge is kind of defined and won by whoever kills deployment friction, because that’s how you build the largest coordinatable fleet and run the infrastructure backbone. And having seen this at Tesla and Span, we sort of knew that was the problem to go after. And you’re right, it’s actually a bit cheaper per kilowatt hour than the whole home system. And, you know, for what it’s worth, we don’t sell actively against Powerwall. It’s an amazing product, and actually, again, unintuitively, something like one in five of our customers today already own a whole home battery-
David Roberts: Hmm.
Cole Ashman: and are layering Pila on top for more capacity-
David Roberts: Hmm.
Cole Ashman: and for appliance-level monitoring. And so I think this notion that, you know, people are scratching their heads and deciding against a generator or a Powerwall or a camping battery or a Pila is maybe not the exact right way to think about it. It’s more like these things are coming down in cost, specialization’s happening, and there’s a lot of room for these products to overlap, and best cases, they work together really well.
David Roberts: Hmm.
Cole Ashman: But I digress.
David Roberts: So who is buying them today? A lot of their marketing materials really focuses on renters, but is that who’s really buying them? ‘Cause like it seems to me, just intuitively, like these are quite expensive and renters are, you know, less affluent than homeowners. It’s like, do you have records, numbers about who your current customers are? Maybe not pre-orders, but actual like shipped units. Do you know who they are?
Cole Ashman: Yeah. We know them well because we like talking to them and understanding why they, you know, are excited about this new product category. So how about we do some stats on this? It’s 60% homeowner, 40% renter, which broadly aligns with just like what the housing stock looks like in this country.
And you know, which is to say like about half of homes are that renter condo persona that couldn’t get a whole home battery today if they wanted. So that’s really interesting because it’s blank space. There’s no great product for them today.
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: But they aren’t exclusively the segment we’re going after. Geographically, I’d say about 50% of our customers are in California, Texas, and the Northeast, where broadly speaking, power prices are going up and outages are routinely getting worse. But we have customers in all 50 states today, including folks who don’t have variable time of use rates, don’t have solar, and are purely buying Pila because it’s kind of the best backup product you could imagine for your essential appliances.
David Roberts: Are people ordering multiples? I’m curious how many of the customers are ordering more than one.
Cole Ashman: More than half.
David Roberts: Interesting. Really?
Cole Ashman: Yes. Which is really interesting, and I think it is a, it speaks to the capabilities of this coordinated system, this battery mesh that can coordinate together and do things like paint the picture of where energy is being used. It can coordinate with rooftop solar if you have it, and that’s an interesting use case because 80% of households with solar on their roof don’t have a battery today.
David Roberts: Yeah, which is wild.
Cole Ashman: So the no contractor, no pain add-on is, it’s a great use case.
David Roberts: And you say geographically these are sort of concentrated in areas where blackouts are more of a problem.
Cole Ashman: Yeah. And I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, I don’t know if I should be embarrassed to say this. I don’t actually know what my monthly power bill is in most months. You know, do I know that my bill is going up here in San Francisco? Yes, I do. But backup power is the thing that gets most consumers over the line, ‘cause a higher bill is frustrating, but a blackout’s visceral.
David Roberts: Yeah, yeah.
Cole Ashman: You know, when the fridge goes warm, the internet dies, the house gets hot, the sump pump stops running. You know, and people already spend billions upon billions of dollars on generators and UPSs and these kind of portable systems ‘cause they want that problem solved. But if you can build a system that solves that acute problem and then also works for you around the clock the rest of the year to manage prices on your bill.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I wanna come back to this subject in just a second and dig in a little bit more, but just a quick, maybe kinda random question. So a few months ago, we talked to the guys from David Energy who are doing this for businesses, but they own the batteries, and the businesses just sort of pay out of the electricity bill savings. It’s a similar thing to what Base is doing for big batteries, sort of like they, the homeowner just pays for installation and it just pays out of savings.
So did you think at all about that model instead of just sort of full retail purchase, sort of like you own it and there’s a no money down sort of thing where the homeowner just pays out of savings? Did you ever consider that model?
Cole Ashman: Yeah. Short answer is yes. But I’ll tell you why we started where we’ve started, which is not the end of the story here. No matter what, today in this world where batteries are somewhat of a considered purchase, the value needs to be incredibly clear and obvious to the end customer, whether it’s sold through B2B channels or bought directly.
And this was a lesson, you know, earned time and time again at Tesla and Span. You know, you want to focus first on delivering the maximum amount of value to the household or the building. But the reason that we’ve spent the engineering effort that we have to put this product together in the way that we have, which is, I call it infrastructure grade, is it’s distributed infrastructure at the end of the day, which means you can finance it like infrastructure.
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: And while we started in this very, very fast kind of consumer market, which is, you know, again, maybe a little non-intuitive, but it lets you go faster to build that relationship with your customer. And again, I go back to this, the grid edge is kind of won by friction reduction and speed of deployment and building a larger coordinated network. We are broadly working alongside folks like David Energy to deploy this to customers of theirs. We are working alongside utilities as well, who own and operate the batteries or discount them.
And we are also absolutely keyed in on some of these other opportunities to go, you know, reduce that friction further by taking the burden of cost away from the customer-
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: and still delivering them, you know, a backup experience that’s better than anything else, and bill savings. And that’s the amazing thing. The lifetime value is so high that these batteries are actually worth multiples of the cost it takes to build them. It’s just putting together that set of partnerships and kind of financing models that allow you to basically give these away for free.
David Roberts: So there are other financing models in the works or on the horizon. There’s different ways of financing these for people.
Cole Ashman: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it actually extends beyond just the traditional energy incumbents, you know, who I would say are, like, the large solar folks and the VPP folks and the ESCOs and the utilities. They’re all quite interested, and we’re working with folks in all of those buckets. But I think the next version of this starts to be a little bit less energy flavored, frankly. You know, the commercial real estate folks, the insurance providers.
David Roberts: Yeah, I was wondering about that, like builders or landlords or whether the real estate people might be interested.
Cole Ashman: And that’s the trick. This same core atomic units that we’ve built, the battery, the edge compute, the sensing, the telemetry, the coordination, that same product, the same platform that runs it, works across all of these channels. You know, it is a-
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: it’s a platform and it’s an infrastructure layer for power control and ultra-ultra high fidelity data and sensing in buildings that goes in way faster than anything else from a retrofit standpoint that delivers a more granular view into the most essential pieces, and then that kind of feeds forward into better control around energy and power. So don’t let the nice consumer branding fool you. You know, we see the need as being much larger than shipping batteries in small boxes.
David Roberts: So currently it’s a consumer play, but you’re thinking about infrastructure plays. Basically, you’re thinking of it in terms of infrastructure. So as you say, probably the main motivator right now for buyers is backup in the case of blackouts, but there’s also these supposed bill savings.
But I’m sort of, just to clarify, like you need to be in an area where there is utility time of use rates to make that work for you at all, right? To make energy arbitrage work for you at all to get any money out of it, you need those time of use rates. Like for instance, like Con Edison customers, most of them are not on time of use rates. So just to be clear, like the bill savings portion of this only works with time of use rates. Is that correct?
Cole Ashman: That’s a good first approximation, but there are other ways to save on the bill. I’ll list a few. You know, one, in our commercial style deployments, things like demand charge management, so not just shifting energy, you know, from one five-hour bucket to another, but solving that 15-minute or one-hour peak can have really significant potential.
David Roberts: That’s a commercial thing. Those are businesses that face those demand charges, right?
Cole Ashman: Businesses, and then weirdly Arizona, you know, this is actually a residential demand charges.
David Roberts: Really?
Cole Ashman: But it is rarer in residential.
David Roberts: That is weird.
Cole Ashman: Otherwise, you’re talking time of use or you’re talking solar arbitrage as well, which is like, it’s actually no different from the whole home battery economic story.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: The maybe add-on there, or there’s two. One is the grid services, the VPP style programs where you can get paid by your utility.
David Roberts: We’ll get to that in a minute. But like on the time of use thing, like if you do the math, you know, say there’s like a 20 cent spread between peak and off-peak, a unit this small, and you’re drawing something like 10 watts just sitting there not doing anything. And if you subtract that from what you get from the peak to off-peak, you’re talking like 50, 60 bucks a year you’re saving on time of use rates. Like, this is not a substantial amount of money.
Cole Ashman: I think it is right that framing these things as money printers is maybe a bit disingenuous, which is why we don’t spend a ton of time on that in our kind of consumer pitch. It can be higher than what you cited. There are areas in the country where the spread is much higher than that.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: There’s also the kind of load management piece. You know, this isn’t purely a battery. It’s also living alongside the load. So while you might not wanna turn your refrigerator off during off hours there are other things in your home for which we can help you identify savings there. But it’s absolutely a your mileage will vary, and the honest answer is-
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: there’s no nationwide payback number. But we are sort of equal to or better than, I would say, your standard whole home system, if you’re really doing the IRR kind of payback math, which is fine. But I think that’s why things like backup power and, you know, peace of mind tend to lead-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: with this, I don’t know, sometimes it feels like post-hoc rationalization around the savings story for end customers. But in the commercial use case, there’s actually quite lucrative savings to be had on the load shaping side. And then while the bill savings might not be as high for the residential customer, I think that’s why it becomes increasingly important to work with these other partners that are trying to solve broader grid scale problems who are paying out for the control.
David Roberts: So if I live in a place, and I do, which does not face blackouts particularly often, where blackouts are not a particular problem, and I do not have time of use rates, and my utility does not offer a VPP program, is there a remaining motivation if you subtract those out? And I have no idea sort of like what the percentage is of US citizens that live in such an area. But, like, is there any motivation left if you subtract those out?
Cole Ashman: It’s lower. You know, I think that’s the honest answer. And by the numbers, and if folks are interested, we did a whole kind of mapping exercise, and it’s on our website, where you can see where power prices have increased and outages have increased.
It’s like one in three counties in the US have had both higher prices and worse outages in the last five years and it’s increasing. So you might be in the rare lucky few there. But, you know, backup power, bill savings, and understanding what’s going on in your home and controlling it are kind of the reasons that you might want to purchase a product like this and pay upfront for it.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: So if your power is super cheap and your power is super reliable, and you’re not that interested in understanding, you know, is my fridge working like it should, and is the temperature inside the right set point, then, you know, well, that’s okay. It Might not be the product for you today.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: But I think over time, it actually does shift away from being this kind of considered purchase to just being default infrastructure.
David Roberts: Yeah, yeah. I’ll get to that later, too. So let’s start with the VPP stuff, virtual power plant stuff. So a couple things. One is these things plugging into a 120 volt standard outlet cannot export power to the grid. So when we talk about their participation in VPPs, we’re just talking about demand response, basically. Although, I guess, like, the line between those is getting fuzzy now. But we’re basically, we’re talking about controllable demand, basically, right?
Cole Ashman: Load shaping. That’s right.
David Roberts: Yeah, yeah. And I just, like, from a utilities perspective, I can put a relatively cheap sensor or timer on a HVAC system or on a hot water heater and get relatively cheap control over a lot of kilowatt hours. And one of these little batteries from a utility perspective is just not a lot of kilowatt hours. So I’m just curious, like, if I’m a utility building a VPP, why would I bother with these tiny little pieces when there are big chunks available to me? And you have a couple of pilots you’ve launched, so you know.
Cole Ashman: Yeah, yeah. Let’s unpack it.
David Roberts: Yeah so tell me like what’s the motivation of the utilities in those cases? Like why not just go after the big chunks? Why go after these little chunks if you’re building a VPP?
Cole Ashman: There’s a few answers. Maybe the first one is I would challenge that it has to be one or the other. You know, these sort of like water heater controls or HVAC or batteries for your essential appliances. I mean, broadly we see utilities looking for any and all solutions that they can get in these constrained regions to open up capacity.
David Roberts: Sure, but they have priorities. You know, there are priority lists.
Cole Ashman: Yeah, and it’s not the water heater in most cases because that also requires, you know, installers and kind of complex deployment mechanics. So the drop ship type solutions, the smart thermostats have led for a long time, but let’s look at, like, one example here, and I can speak confidently about this because we’re evaluating this opportunity with a few different utilities. In New Jersey, in PJM, the cost to serve the customers is increasingly driven by the transmission cost-
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: which is set by five coincident peaks throughout the year that are about one hour long. And on average, for each of those residential customers, they’re trying to solve about a 2kW load reduction. And that actually is pretty well-tuned. And remember, most of our customers have more than one of these batteries, and often it is things like the fridge and the window AC, the kind of medium-consuming loads. And the thing about a battery is it’s both very predictable, and it doesn’t ask for the occupant to compromise.
You know the challenge with thermostat control is, one, it’s actually quite hard to time that load reduction, because on either side of that target window, you actually increase the load to pre-cool and then to, you know, make up-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: for the fact that you’ve shut somebody’s AC off on a 98-degree day.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: So batteries are predictable. Batteries can be, this style of battery can be drop-shipped. Broadly don’t need, you know, PUC approval and all of these other kind of complexities that, like, utilities don’t necessarily want to go through all of those hoops.
So increasingly, it’s becoming a power problem that looks more like shaping a few of these key hours, and, you know, utilities are broadly, at least we’re talking to, are broadly focused on just solving it via batteries after toiling in the kind of like IoT promised land that hasn’t really materialized with all of these other things. Even EV chargers, I mean, they, in theory, you’ve got 7, 8kW to play with, but there are studies done on this, you know, the actual kind of average load reduction from an EV charger is something like 400 watts once you discount-
David Roberts: Hmm.
Cole Ashman: is the thing online? Is the car plugged in? Is it charged at exactly that time that you want it? So, you know, I don’t disagree with some of what you’ve said, but we’re living it in a slightly different view of it, where we have utilities knocking down our door saying like, “Oh, you can drop ship a battery, and we can get reliable, repeatable reduction in this kind of 2kW range that makes a big dent in our transmission costs.”
David Roberts: That’s interesting. So the fact that it’s not a huge amount of kilowatt hours you think is made up for by the fact that it’s easy and reliable, and no impact on the homeowner basically, or the renter.
Cole Ashman: Yeah. And I think like, again, increasingly it’s becoming a power problem that looks more like one or two hours, and we’ve intentionally designed our system to be, you know, big engine, small tank for that reason.
David Roberts: Hmm.
Cole Ashman: Whereas when we built Powerwall, the goal was store a bunch of solar during the day and shift it-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: 12 hours to the nighttime. So it was medium engine, big tank.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm. And talk briefly about these two pilots.
Cole Ashman: Yep. So we are working with a couple of different utilities going through pilot process now that we’ve been shipping for the last few months. One is Holy Cross Energy, a co-op out in Colorado, whose interests span the kind of resilience side as Colorado is unfortunately following California in increased fires and planned safety power shutoffs. So-
David Roberts: Hmm.
Cole Ashman: you know, residential customers, but also businesses, you know, that, you know, traditionally are not the Powerwall customer, who are suffering business interruption and things like this. So solving that acute problem, but also, hey, if you’re bothering to deploy these great battery assets, why don’t we control them, you know, and opt them into the VPP DR load reduction style programs as well? And that’s exactly what we’re proving out there, both in residential single family and multifamily with them.
David Roberts: So in Holy Cross, is the utility helping to pay for them, or are they just rounding them up and helping to control them?
Cole Ashman: In this first phase, the utility’s paying for them and deploying them. In the next phases, there’s a few options that are on the table, and candidly don’t have the exact sort of dollars that a customer will pay or not, but generally some sort of, you know, rebate, discount, opt-in-
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: type of thing. ‘Cause again, I think the best case here is we stop asking customers to pay thousands of dollars for these things that are so useful for these entities that are much more capable of financing infrastructure. Does that mean that every battery will be free? Probably not, but I do think we can bring down the cost even well below the cheapest kind of portable camping, glamping battery that you would buy to make it more of a no-brainer and, you know, drive that deployment flywheel.
David Roberts: So you think, like, in your envisioned future, a customer paying full retail price, just buying the thing off the shelf, is probably going to be the rarer use case in that in most cases, there’s gonna be some kind of subsidy or some kind of financing from either a utility or some sort of real estate interest or some other entity?
Cole Ashman: It’ll be a mix. You know, there are a lot of customers, our customers, that tell us, you know, “Hey, we’re actually not interested in a subscription model or something. I wanna buy it, I wanna own it.”
You know, and we respect that. We also don’t charge subscription costs on the basic experience for that reason. Like, could you imagine buying a Nest thermostat and paying a dollar a month to change the temperature? You know, like, that’s just not, I don’t think that’s the world and the product space that we want to build. We want high trust, and we’ll allow those customers to buy it upfront, no problem. We actually love that. That’s easy for us.
But I think to convert this to mass market from, you know, like the 10% of homes that are buying pull-start generators or that have backup generators today, it’s kind of a backup niche, solving that acute problem. To convert it to mass market, I do think it needs to become a bit more like default infrastructure, where absolutely, if we can lower the upfront cost for these end customers with the very fair trade-off of a couple hours a year that they can opt out of events, and utilities and folks like that will pay for it, then that does seem like a very compelling model to build.
David Roberts: And then your other pilot is with Brooklyn SolarWorks. How does that work? What’s the structure there?
Cole Ashman: Yeah. We are, we’re working with a number of solar installers, Brooklyn SolarWorks being particularly interesting because they serve New York City.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: And, you know, like you mentioned it earlier in the episode, New York has been a hard market for folks to adopt batteries, just given some of the building codes and standards. So with Brooklyn SolarWorks and others, we are going back to solar-only customers that may have opted out of the whole home installed battery for structural reasons, like, “Hey, I couldn’t get it,” or, “It’s too expensive,” and offering them Pila, which talks to their solar system and does all of that same value. So the solar pairing story, I think it just speaks to the fact that this is a lot more than a point system for backup power. Really is a tool for shifting load and shaping load in these homes.
David Roberts: When you say it pairs with rooftop solar, what does that mean exactly? Is it sensing somehow the production of the solar, or is it just, like, you know, adopting, like, a daylight schedule, a when the sun is up schedule, or is there some actual communication between the solar and the battery?
Cole Ashman: There’s communication. You know, I think for your technical listeners, you know, there’s basically, like, two ways to do batteries and solar. There’s AC coupled and DC coupled.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: DC is, like, the solar, which produces direct current, and the battery, which is direct current, kind of share the same DC bus, and then there’s a, an inverter that they share-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: to go convert that to alternating current for the home. The other model, which is increasingly popular, and, you know, this is sort of what we built with Powerwall, is you’ve got just a solar inverter that’s taking the solar on the roof, DC, converting it to AC, feeding it into the electrical panel.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: And then you’ve got the same thing for the battery, its own independent inverter, and it’s drawing from and pushing to the electrical panel. We are essentially an AC-coupled battery, and we communicate with the solar system in a similar way that a, you know, Powerwall-style AC-coupled battery would to track that production in real time.
David Roberts: Okay. And the mesh thing. What’s up with that? What does that mean? Yeah, you say you can mesh up to 64 of these. Obviously, like a homeowner or a renter not gonna buy 64 of these things, so like what is the practical upshot of that? Who’s gonna mesh all these together? Like, you know, if I buy two, I can mesh them, but like what does that, what does the mesh thing mean, and what is the advantage that comes with it?
Cole Ashman: What does it mean? Yeah, it’s a good one. So no, homes are not gonna buy 64, but the commercial multi-tenant building, you know, can scale actually up to the hundreds of nodes or thousands, and then you start envisioning this as a distributed Megapack, you know, on the urban grid-
David Roberts: Hmm.
Cole Ashman: rather than just a collection of batteries that are, you know, cobbled together via some crappy cloud connection. But let’s talk about the mesh, right? So I think maybe a good analogy is mesh Wi-Fi, ‘cause that’s what people are familiar with. You know, the first version of networking in a building was wired ethernet. You ran a cable-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: where you wanted connectivity, then you had a central Wi-Fi router in one location, but sort of the further away you got, the more walls you put in between, the worse the system worked. But mesh Wi-Fi changed the architecture. Instead of one big central access point, you deploy a set of relatively simple nodes around the building, and you can add them incrementally, and they communicate with one another, and together they behave like one network, and the system improves as you add coverage.
The Pila analogy is pretty direct. We’re not routing internet packets. We’re routing information about power and coordinating that flexibility. So instead of one big central battery or one central control point trying to understand the whole building from the electrical panel, we put battery and compute nodes next to the loads themselves, and each node understands what’s happening locally. They communicate with each other locally, and that’s really important. You know, we’re kind of like cloud as an accessory because this stuff needs to work all the time.
And together they behave like one energy system. And so underneath that analogy, the mesh really has two jobs. The first is staying connected. Most smart home devices put a $1 Wi-Fi radio in and make the connectivity the customer’s problem for the next 10 years.
That does not clear the bar for power infrastructure. So Pila nodes, they communicate directly with each other locally, securely. They have the on-device compute and control, and then they also all have cellular as a redundant path back out of the building.
So job one, staying connected. Job two is coordination. If I have three batteries, I do not want three selfish boxes, each optimizing for itself. I want one local system deciding which node should charge when it should discharge, how much backup reserve to protect, which loads matter, and how do I respond to something like a grid signal without violating what the customer wants? And that’s what we mean by this mesh operating system.
David Roberts: But when I think about that, I think about a landowner with multiple tenants and multiple units. Like, for a single homeowner, am I getting anything out of that mesh? Like, I don’t... Does my refrigerator really need to coordinate that much with my window AC unit? Like, is this mainly for bigger deployments?
Cole Ashman: It certainly unlocks bigger deployments, and for the end customer, it just makes it a dead simple product. You know, it doesn’t require independent programming and setup and maintenance of each individual one with its own Wi-Fi radio. Like, you plug in the next one a year later, it automatically connects, synchronizes, knows your, maybe not in your case, but the customer’s time of use, schedule, preferences, things like this, and it’s guaranteed to stay connected, you know, for 10 years.
Here’s an interesting stat. When I was working on Powerwall, we did a ton of analysis around customer Wi-Fi. We had this problem where within six months, something like 20 to 40% of the Powerwall systems would disconnect from home Wi-Fi. Was it a technology challenge problem? No. It turns out that customers were changing their passwords and getting new routers.
David Roberts: Ha.
Cole Ashman: And they gave their password to an electrician on a sticky note to help do the system setup and they changed it the next day, and this was costing Tesla a lot in, you know, maintenance and-
David Roberts: Hilarious.
Cole Ashman: support and things like this. So, you know, the mesh is very cool. It is a bit more of a, an infrastructure story at the larger scale.
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: But there are real benefits, you know, that just make the thing a delight to use in your home without having to kind of be an energy engineering type-
David Roberts: Right, and this just happens when you plug it in. You don’t, as a homeowner, you don’t have to do anything to this.
Cole Ashman: Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s like, how amazing is it when you open up your MacBook and, you know, it’s like, “Hey, do you wanna share the password from this phone to the next?” It’s like that kind of seamless coordination between devices is what we are striving for, and it does have all of these great infrastructure grade benefits, but it also makes these disparate pieces just really work well together.
David Roberts: So there are lots of products coming along, lots of different... I mean, like, if people are, you know, subscribed to Kickstarter, there’s all sorts of wacky battery products popping up now. People are really going for it on the little battery market, and there are lots of just sort of like a box battery, like a portable battery, theoretically, that you could back up, you know, stuff in your home with, for cheaper than your product. Is it the telemetry and the mesh and the computing that is your sort of moat, that is your advantage relative to all these other battery products?
Cole Ashman: You know, we’re focused on in this conversation very much on, like, the hardware and the technology, but really it’s about what you do with that.
David Roberts: Mm.
Cole Ashman: You know, like a portable power station, fine. It’s designed for episodic backup and mobility, and you charge it, you move it around, you take it camping. There are some that are, they’re kind of retooling the camping battery to make it a bit slimmer to put it on top of the fridge. You know, great.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: That’ll do one thing for your home. But Pila was really designed from day one to be this 10-year always connected energy infrastructure. And let’s do it this way. By way of an analogy, Tesla Powerwall and Enphase batteries have something like 85% market share, and why is that when they’re 2x the cost of the cheaper option? You know, I think that’s worth unpacking because ultimately it’s not just about the absolute cheapest battery box, just like it’s not about always buying the absolute cheapest compact sedan or appliance-
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: when it’s something that you count on. So I don’t want to paint a picture that, you know, Pila is only exclusively this premium product, but we’ve been really selective about the components, the technology, the safety profile, the cells, and the capabilities that get smarter over time in this product. And what we’ve found is for many, if not most customers, that actually matters a lot. And we are talking about cheaper, but we’re talking, you know, maybe $200, $300 here or there. And-
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: our cost structure, we’ve talked about a little earlier, also benefits from the fact that battery cells are getting cheaper and, you know, broadly these kind of electronic components are coming down in cost. So-
David Roberts: Well, I mean, they were. They were... until tariffs and data centers came along.
Cole Ashman: Yeah.
David Roberts: Are you worried at all... I mean, when I look out to the future, I see, like, there are already some sort of high-end stoves that have batteries built in now. Carrier is talking about building batteries into their AC units. You know, as batteries get cheaper, as battery cells get cheaper, I could sort of envision batteries just kind of being built into everything, including, like, new homes that are built or new apartment buildings, new appliances, you know. Do you worry that, like, a separate battery product is, in the fullness of time, gonna get squeezed out by just sort of, like, all these other built-in batteries becoming ubiquitous and battery storage basically becoming sort of, like, taken for granted and everywhere?
Cole Ashman: I share that conviction. That will be the future in 10 years.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: And I think if this is successful, the quote-unquote battery becomes much less visible as a category. You know-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: storage will end up inside appliances and-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: yeah, attached to HVAC and in cars and electrical equipment, and scattered throughout the building because it gets cheap enough that you stop, you know, asking, “Do we want to buy a battery?” But the hard question there is how do all of those things behave as one system, and can you count on them like grid infrastructure? You know, the grand vision of Pila is certainly not we want to go sell standalone batteries. But having built products in this space for a while, we tend to be pretty pragmatic and we think we have our finger on the pulse of, you know, what the moment demands. And in this moment, we are at the Roku, the Fire Stick stage of smart TVs.
David Roberts: That’s a good analogy. And, but, like, you theoretically could pivot. You could be a supplier to, like, a refrigerator manufacturer for built-in batteries or something like that. Like, you could do other things than a standalone battery.
Cole Ashman: Absolutely. The core technology is kind of infinitely composable into these different shapes and sizes.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: And the hard part is, you know, the power electronics, the coordination, and the software layer that kind of wraps them, keeps the whole building coordinated locally, and can connect that coordinated building-level asset upwards towards the grid while balancing occupant needs, appliance needs, and requests from grid operators. That’s the hard problem. The hard problem is coordination. That’s what we’re most focused on. We decided to build the first version of that platform in this way because it allows us to go, frankly, faster-
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: than, most other folks. You know, if we had put a battery in a fridge, we’d have probably a pretty expensive fridge that-
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: you know, worked for some folks and not for all.
David Roberts: The stove with the battery is a very high-end stove, let’s just say.
Cole Ashman: They’re very nice, too. Yeah, they’re super nice. I am big fans of what the Sams are building. And, you know, I think we need more of this from all angles.
David Roberts: Speaking of speed, like, do you think, are you willing to sort of predict that these sort of smaller edge batteries are going to race ahead of full-scale home batteries? Like, do you think you’re gonna deploy a lot faster, get a lot more batteries into a lot more homes and apartments? Like, that’s kind of the premise, right? I mean, that’s sort of the premise of the whole thing.
Cole Ashman: That’s the bet. And it’s not just faster, but further, you know, into more of the built environment, the condos, the renters, the multifamily, the commercial spaces, for which a big battery in your yard, you know, designed for your yard is probably not the right architecture.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: So I think we do believe that, we’re, that this is a way to go faster, and it is not only faster, but in many cases, like we discussed, it’s a lower landed cost. And in taking this distributed approach, we have higher fidelity data which feeds into better control.
So I, it’s not just about cheaper, smaller, it’s actually about kind of recognizing that the most interesting parts of the distribution grid are where the loads connected to it exist. And by having that understanding, you can actually do a better job shaping things. Here’s one example. If you’re living alongside the HVAC system or the refrigerator, you know, and you’ve got a, you know, small 1.6 kilowatt hour battery, but you also have awareness of internal temperature in the home, inside the fridge, you can play with power modulation to make that 1.6 kilowatt hours go further.
You know because what is a fridge if not a thermal battery? You can’t do that unless you’ve got that really, you know, close relationship with the appliance and the load. So maybe a little bit of a forward-looking hint at some of the interesting controls that we’re building.
David Roberts: Well, yeah, I wanna talk about that in a second, but I wonder, like utilities is sort of like one of the sort of sources of angst lately, is that all this stuff is happening on the distribution edge, and a lot of it’s just sort of invisible to utilities. They sort of like don’t know what’s happening. This is, you know, the big problem with solar panels. But all this stuff, like are utilities knocking at your door just for the information, just for the informational benefits, just for better knowledge of how their power is being used at the edge?
Cole Ashman: In some cases, yeah, absolutely. We are doing innovation partnership with PG&E out here in California, and we have some batteries installed in their San Ramon facility that is meant to be kind of a, an electrified home of the future with V2H and all these batteries and, you know, that’s a big part of the story. How do we get all of these things coordinating locally? And in PG&E’s case, to give them credit, I think they’re thinking about it less, you know, from a greedy standpoint, saying, “We need all the data.” They’re actually very focused on a local first control layer.
But, you know, I think it is fair if customers are, you know, if it’s transparent, customers opt in and utilities are paying some of the way here to share that data in a way that respects customers’ privacy and does give these utilities a better map of the distribution grid.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: Which, in many cases, like utilities don’t have very good visibility on the last mile of the grid.
David Roberts: Yeah, I mean, like just distribution planning is becoming such a huge thing, and so just the need for better maps, better information seems to me to be a huge piece of this. Well, to wrap up, let’s look forward. What, in the next, say, five years, how is the technology gonna change? How is the business model gonna change? When you think about a plan moving forward, what are the next pieces of the plan?
Cole Ashman: Yeah.
David Roberts: And are there technology changes outside of your control that you are sort of anticipating or relying on that are gonna open up new possibilities, you know, bidirectional outlets or regulatory changes like legalizing export or, you know, all sorts of things like, I’m just curious how you see this evolving over the next five years.
Cole Ashman: Yeah. Okay. I love the question. I could probably give 20 bullet points on this, but I’m gonna restrain myself. And maybe I’ll answer the ones that you-
David Roberts: So let’s do a top 10.
Cole Ashman: Yeah. That’s another episode. Since you asked it, you know, the bidirectionality at the outlet, things are moving really fast there. You may be aware of this, your listeners may be aware of this, you know, Pila is bidirectional capable just like a modern EV. Most modern EVs are. We absolutely see that as where the puck is going, and we’ve built for that future.
David Roberts: And is that a mostly a regulatory thing, or is there technology changes required to make that possible?
Cole Ashman: Technology for sure. You know, not every inverter is capable of doing this kind of thing in this way. And it’s a bet that we made on the technology. And it is one, you know, like one hardware design thing that separates us pretty distinctly from these camping batteries today.
The outlet level bidirectionality thing, to me, is very reminiscent of early days of rooftop solar and Powerwall. It’s like, “What do you mean you can’t connect something that just feeds into an electrical panel. This is a one-way system.” And-
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: you know, fast-forward to where we are now, like the posts have moved. We’ve advanced this forward, and it’s not ever done by some sweeping legislation. So despite there being, you know, I think 50 bills in 35 states for the balcony solar plug-in thing-
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: Yeah. You know, the way this actually moves forward is by addressing concerns through very important but very boring discussions in UL-
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Cole Ashman: and NEC code-making panel discussions, which, you know, we like participating in that stuff ‘cause that’s how you get this done. But things are moving forward there. We have new UL standards that are coming out. This is absolutely a topic of discussion, and there are some very real, like, questions and topics being addressed on how you do this safely. But there’s also precedent. You know, Europe, Germany, I’m sure people know, balcony solar has been broadly deployed there in millions of homes now. So I think in three to five years, we will absolutely see, here in this country, in the US, ability to feed back into an outlet in a controlled, safe way.
David Roberts: Interesting.
Cole Ashman: The, you know, other technology pieces, while we’ve said the word battery, I don’t know how many times-
David Roberts: I say the word battery a lot on this podcast.
Cole Ashman: As you should. It’s a fun thing to talk about. You know, we are not in the battery chemistry game. We’re working with whatever the best chemistry is that’s safest and gets the job done. I do think sodium-ion and some of these other chemistries are quite interesting, but for us, it’s really the controls story.
David Roberts: Yes.
Cole Ashman: So we are most interested in pushing the forefront at integration and showing that a coordinated building level system across, you know, multi-tenant and commercial can be reliably counted on as infrastructure. And that’s exciting because we’re not waiting on some technology breakthrough. It’s really a combination of product innovation, partnerships, some small advances in legislation and rulemaking, and we are just on the cusp of kind of proving that this kind of thing can work and can be a really valuable part of the distribution planning process. And if we do our jobs well, we’re also helping, you know, the average American home through tough events like power outages and hopefully helping them understand and reduce their bill a bit more.
And then we already said it, like, I think the future of this is a bit more boring. It’s infrastructure that is coordinated behind the scenes, and our homes and our businesses just take care of us a little bit better, they cost a little bit less to operate, and we can, you know, go about doing the things that we like to do in our daily lives without hassle.
David Roberts: Yeah. It’s interesting that when I ask you to look forward, mostly you are thinking from the infrastructure perspective and kind of the big picture perspective. Do you sort of think that, like, in the fullness of time, you know, ‘cause I was gonna ask, like, well, how is the thing gonna change from the customer’s perspective, but I almost wonder, like, do you think in the fullness of time, this is going to sort of disappear from the customer’s view and not be a customer perspective at all? Do you know what I mean? Like, this is going to disappear into infrastructure and consumers aren’t gonna have to think about it or buy it or fuss with it at all. Is that sort of the endpoint, do you think?
Cole Ashman: Yeah, I do. I channel the Amory Lovins mentality. A lot of people don’t care about kilowatt hours and electrons.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: They care about hot showers and cold beer. The other reason I think that’s an important end state is that just means it’s, like, one less thing to worry about.
David Roberts: Yes.
Cole Ashman: And I think it’s an honest approach to just how we improve quality of life. We don’t need to beat people over the head with the climate stick and make them, you know, pay out of pocket to adopt-
David Roberts: Yes.
Cole Ashman: expensive technologies. We just need to kind of collectively figure out how to deploy tech that we already have, make it easy, you know, and easy often means boring, and our place in this is we intend to be at that kind of infrastructure layer. Will we continue to have products with our brand on it and, you know, be for- front and center in some homes? Maybe. You know, I think we’ve built a strong brand so far, and there are a lot of folks that do care about kilowatt hours and electrons and that’s great. But I think, you know, your question was 10, 20 years looking forward-
David Roberts: Yeah.
Cole Ashman: and that’s how I see it.
David Roberts: Yeah. Interesting. And I think this is a theme that comes up a lot, I think, in a lot of my recent discussions, which is just sort of the migration of clean energy from a customer product, a consumer product, to infrastructure, basically. To thinking of just in general, thinking about it more like infrastructure.
Cole Ashman: Yeah, absolutely. It does not have to be one or the other. I think there’s a lot of great prosumer products that we can draw on, but delivering impact, I think we have to drive through the path of being an infrastructure player because otherwise, you know, it’s... We’ve seen this with other, quote-unquote, “smart home technologies” like, I don’t know, smart doorbells and things like that.
David Roberts: Mm. Yeah.
Cole Ashman: You kind of tap out at 10 to 20% of early adopters pretty quickly. But hey, utility smart meters, that’s 80% penetration, you know?
David Roberts: Right.
Cole Ashman: Very, two very different products, but point being, we need to operate our grid way more effectively than we are now. Batteries are clearly the tool to do that. There’s so much benefit that we can realize by putting these behind the meter in terms of resilience and bill savings and all the things that we’ve talked about. So we see that as the piece to push on. And again, I feel like I’ve, I’m a broken record, but at the end of the day, it’s really just about making life easier for folks and, you know, not adding another thing to their plate.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm. All right. All right. Interesting. Well, this is fascinating. I love talking about batteries. My children mock me for talking about batteries so often. So this, the pod is my safe place where I can talk about batteries endlessly with people who also care.
Cole Ashman: Yeah.
David Roberts: So thanks for coming on, walking us through it. I appreciate it.
Cole Ashman: It’s absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, and, we’ll talk soon.
David Roberts: All right. Bye.
