CleanTechies

#253 The Plug-and-Play Battery Solution for Modern Home Energy | Cole Ashman (Pila Energy)

• Silas & Somil • Season 1 • Episode 253

Share episode

Today, we're speaking with Cole Ashman, the CEO and founder of Pila Energy. 

Pila is democratizing access to battery backup systems through industrial-grade, consumer-priced batteries that are simply plug-and-play. No electricians, no permitting, just reliable power.

Pila's innovative approach is disrupting the home energy market, from enabling demand response programs to making backup power accessible and affordable for everyone. Listen today to hear how they are reshaping energy reliability and demand response access. 

Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

Select Quotes From This Episode:

  • "Controlling loads... shutting off your air condition, technically great, but who wants their AC shut off on the hottest day of the year?" 

  • "We're able to turn entire apartment complexes into batteries by coordinating up to hundreds of these distributed batteries." 


[Sponsor] ErthTech Talent: Affordable CleanTech Search Firm

To build a successful CleanTech startup, you need the right people.
Affordable: Our search fee is 12-15% of first-year base salary (most charge 25-30%).
Specialized: We ONLY work with CleanTech startups.
Proven: 70+ placements since 2020 (Aypa Power, ChargeScape, QCells, & more). 

Save time and money when you work with ErthTech Talent. Plus, Silas runs it, so you already know him. — Reach out today and tell him you saw this ad.

Links

Support the show

If you're gonna change the world, you're gonna need a world-class team. Partner with ErthTech Talent to help you do that, for less.

  • 70+ Placements
  • 5+ Years (exclusively in CleanTech)
  • The Lowest Fees in the Market (12-15% of first-year salary)
  • 90-day placement guarantee

It's really hard to say no to that.

Wait?! -- The best service is also the cheapest? Seems too good to be true, but it's the entire reason we started this company.

We believe that Climate entrepreneurs are doing important work, and there should be a firm to help them find the best talent, without it breaking the bank.

Reach out today for a free assessment of your hiring process. hello@erthtechtalent.com

Cole Ashman (00:00.174)
We're building the next generation of energy control operating systems.

Today, we are speaking with Cole Ashman, the CEO and founder of Pila Energy.

That allows you to add more battery capacity to your house, shifting your energy, saving more on bills, really right sizing it to the need.

They are democratizing access to battery backup systems through industrial grade, but consumer priced batteries.

Buying a generator in some cases may be cheaper, but the effort to kind of maintain it over the lifetime is generally more expensive.

Silas Mähner (00:32.652)
very easy, no electricians needed and everybody can access it.

You can have the best idea in the world, but if you don't have people to kind of support the journey, you know, it's...

Silas Mähner (00:48.462)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Clean Techies, the number one podcast for clean tech founders out there to learn from other founders who have walked before them. I'm Silas Maynard, Clean Tech Headhunter at Earth Tech Talent. And today I will be your host. All right. Today we are speaking with Cole Ashman, the CEO and founder of Pila Energy. That's P-I-L-A Energy. And what they are doing is they are democratizing access to battery backup systems through industrial grade, but consumer priced batteries that are simply, you you buy them, they come up.

come to your house, you plug them into your wall, plug your appliances into the battery and everything is set. So whether you want to back up your refrigerator or your Wi-Fi, it doesn't really matter. It's up to you. They're very affordable for anybody to be able to do this. So the reason he came across this problem, this solution was Cole used to work at Tesla and he was working on the Powerwall product. And over time he realized that there needed to be a solution that was more accessible to anybody from a cost perspective because

You know, most Tesla Powerwall setups will range around like 20 grand to start and they go up from there. But something that was more affordable but also didn't require any permitting, didn't require install costs or construction costs, and also you didn't need an electrician to set up. So that's what they built. They built this very nice sleek battery that can kind of back up any of your critical appliances. You just order it, shows up, plug it in, no electrician needed. So on top of solving the kind of the blackout issue and keeping things reliable,

It also allows you to access demand response programs, AKA, you you've charged your battery when it's, when the cost of electricity is cheap and you discharge the battery and use the battery when the cost of electricity is high. A lot of utilities are rolling out these demand response programs to help them meet the demands of energy on the grid. So you get bit of both worlds there. It's a very nice setup. So in today's conversation, we ended up walking through their technology, what the market landscape looks like, how their technology compares to others.

We discussed their go-to-market strategy, his philosophy on team building, and then what he's looking forward to in the future. So before we get into it, big shout out to Earth Tech Talent for sponsoring this episode. Reach out to them if you are looking to get help hiring the best clean tech talent, but without the absurdly high recruiter fees. All right, enjoy the episode. All right, welcome to the podcast. Cole, how are doing today?

Cole Ashman (03:03.937)
I'm doing great. How are you?

I am fine as frog hair as I usually say. Anybody who listens to this show is probably sick of hearing that. But that's a saying my dad always said growing up and I like to use it. Not many people heard it but hard things in San Francisco.

Always an exciting week, week to week here building startups in San Francisco and this week is no exception.

Yeah, absolutely, man. We obviously got to hang out when I was out there visiting and it was my first time in San Francisco. I talked about this on the last podcast too but I think I'm going to be riding high on that trip for quite some time. was quite invigorating for me to be able to just feel the energy of the city and get to see some really cool places in Silicon Valley. But I guess let's get into what you're working on, right? Enough about my travels. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you're working on today.

Absolutely. My name is Cole Ashman. I'm the founder and CEO of Pela Energy and we're building the next generation of energy control operating system for our homes and buildings that's based on distributed batteries. So for some folks might be familiar with products like Powerwall, which I'm actually proud to say that I got to contribute to at Tesla on that team.

Cole Ashman (04:16.642)
But unlike big garage batteries, we've built lots of small distributed batteries that can bring backup power, but also energy management and smarts to your home and business with a lot less friction than the big fixed expensive systems. And we'll get into it, hardware, software, kind of at the energy and intelligence nexus at our core.

Yeah.

Silas Mähner (04:41.778)
Yeah, so obviously this is podcast and people aren't looking up on YouTube. Maybe they're looking up while we chat about your company, but can you just describe what your battery looks like?

Yeah. So the first product that we've launched is a small, slim and very sleek battery product designed to go in the home. So think above the refrigerator, under your desk, wherever power is most important to you, you know, in the, the equipment room next to the sump pump room by room, appliance by appliance are sort of sleek battery pairs with your most essential devices. Fridge is a great use case.

And like I said, brings backup power sort of out of the gate. when the utility power cuts out, which is happening more and more, both across the U S and globally, our battery kicks in automatically. You're notified to your phone anywhere in the world. And the system really takes care of that appliance. And, know, what we're doing, kind of beyond that is also what we call the digital twin or the Pila OS layer, which is.

you know, hey, we've got this persistent relationship with your important appliances, your fridge. And we're also at the fridge, not in the garage. So we can tell you things like temperature, performance, efficiency. Think of it like an Apple watch for that, you know, for that fridge or that important appliance, which is all about putting you in control and, you know, in the background, saving you money on your utility bills and saving you the headache of appliance failure unexpectedly.

Yeah, exactly. I can vouch for it being very slick and sleek design. I quite like it. It gives a lot of Apple vibes. I'll say that.

Cole Ashman (06:25.186)
into the industrial design and I'd say that we've partnered with some of the best here in Silicon Valley. Think Nest, think Eero design, that's kind of the caliber for what we're going for. And I think it's important because as people adopt new technology, it's not just about the kind of background optimization. If you're inviting new technology into your home, whether it's the smart doorbell or kitchen appliances, we all care a lot and we should care a lot about design.

And good design, you know, transcends hardware. It's also the software just working and integrating with the rest of your home, which is also a big part of what we're building here.

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I could go on a whole rant about how some of my smart hardware has been not very smart lately, but it's mostly on the user experience, right? Sometimes it's really poorly designed. But before we get into some of those nuances about the experience for you guys or for your customers, I'm curious, you know, how did you guys go so quickly from kind of concept and build, I guess you could say establishing the company in April of 2024 to then, I believe you guys will be shipping a decent amount of product probably by the end of this year, is that correct?

That's right. That's right. Yeah. There's a few ways to answer this. You one way is we're building an hour sweet spot. Myself and the amazing team that we have have been building category defining home energy products for years. Now I mentioned working on Tesla's residential energy team. Prior to Pila, I led the hardware product team at a company called Spam who created the smart electrical panel.

So the fuse box that's in every home kind of turning that into an intelligent power router. Other folks on the team, you know, come via Apple and electric vehicle and Amazon Alexa and things like this. So, you know, having a great team, that's one way to answer it. Having familiarity and conviction around the need and building hardware kind of at the pace of software as we like to describe it, which is a combination of, you know, modern, modern tools. AI of course comes into that picture.

Cole Ashman (08:29.106)
but also just a principled way of building, quickly iterating, trying things, making decisions, focusing on the most important things rather than trying to do everything at once. We like to think of it as building on the shoulders of giants kind of thing, which even in the world of hardware you can do.

So just out of curiosity, you there's always these stories about Steve Jobs and like trying to make things smaller, make it sleeker, whatever. When you're coming up with this, is it mostly focused on, hey, you know, let's pack it into this kind of space that we have or did you first say, hey, let's figure out the technology and then kind of reverse engineer it back and re-engineer it to make it into a nice compact design?

I think if you're Steve Jobs and you have Apple caliber kind of size of team and manufacturing partners, you can push for that. From our lens, as a startup who both want to deliver high quality and move quickly, you have to balance the two. And I think that's where having kind of pragmatic understanding of what it takes to build in this space allows you to do. So it's both sides. It's, we really can't compromise on form factor up to a degree.

You know, and here's, here are the break points, you know, above this size, it gets harder to install in this scenario. but then also being able to kind of take feedback from development teams, engineers, partners, and say like, okay, look, this is real, a real constraint and we're not going to invest in, know, inventing a brand new manufacturing technique at this stage of company. So how do we find the way through the middle? And often there is a middle path. It may require some creativity.

a couple of design cycles, but I think being principled about what are the most important things and not getting hung up on detours.

Silas Mähner (10:13.826)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm going to try to just kind of imagine this out for people and then you can kind of clean up what I get wrong and then I just want to understand like the user experience from basically beginning to end, right? Including the long-term. you know, say I've got, you know, I want to make sure my Wi-Fi is always on and I'm in an area prone to outages, right? I'm going to get one of these batteries. I'm going to pick it up or get it delivered online, I suppose, right? And then I'm just going to put it in.

It's this nice thing I can carry probably. I don't know how heavy it is exactly, but I can set it right next to my router and always make sure that my internet's gonna be on, my computer's gonna be backed up. Everything's gonna be good. Plug it in, maybe set up some things on the app. Walk me through like all of the nuances of this and what does the experience look like over the long haul.

Yeah. So what you described was self-setup and that's something that we're uniquely doing with this class of product. Let's take a step back and just talk about backup power for a second. There is a lot of value and interesting software for energy optimization that is a huge part of our DNA, but let's just talk about backup power. And the reason I say that is that's how most people engage with this early on.

I'm sick of outages, you know, I've got stuff in the fridge, my wifi goes out, like you said, I want a solution. Today you have a few options. You can get the kind of portable camping battery. You can get the Pulse Start gas generator, or you can have a professionally installed system, a large whole home generator, or a big garage battery system. Both are installed by electricians. In the kind of self-install category, you know, checks the box on cheap.

And in some cases, like the battery, know, renters can get it and the rest, but it really falls short on the intelligence side. You know, it's not saving you money. It's not really doing anything outside of that outage scenario. And in the outage, it's very manual, you know? So if you need to leave home, if you need to kind of, you know, take your eye off of the thing, you can't guarantee that it's going to be working and you have to press a button and run extension cords. It's a mess, right? On the fixed side is great, but you know, the cost and the accessibility are

Cole Ashman (12:21.132)
the main barrier. You so if you were to get a smart central home battery installed by an electrician in the US, generally your entry ticket price is five figures, $20,000 or more. And if you add solar into that, you know, you're you're talking even beyond that. So I people have this sticker shock. And by the way, you have to pull permits, which means you need to own the home. So folks that live in multi tenant buildings or rent live in a condo, maybe they have HOAs are kind of

left out today of getting that awesome product. So we said, why don't we merge the two? Why don't we make something that's as intelligent as the Powerwall, meaning it's seamless, smart, safe, automatic backup power, plus 24, 7, 365 energy management to save on your bills, to kind of put you in control of your home energy and to give you more insight into the most important facets of your home and the appliances inside of it. But

make it as accessible as the thing that you can go get off the shelf at Home Depot or buy on Amazon or whatever it is. So we're self-installed, but we're super smart and infrastructure grade. Longer preamble than you asked for, but I think that's a really important piece of our differentiation story that I like to highlight. All right. You want to buy the product. Let's say, you you care about your home office, your podcast recording studio, whatever it is. You buy the device. You don't need an installer.

because it literally plugs into the wall and you connect what's most important to us. It's effectively a modern UPS. If folks kind of remember the old lead acid battery systems that would beep at you and maybe kind of back up some lights in the computer, it's a turbocharged intelligent UPS that is networked. So not only can you plug in larger things like refrigerators and sump pumps, but you can also distribute these across the home. So maybe you start in your office, but just like

any smart network home product, whether it's Sonos or Eero, the magic is in how all of these things work together seamlessly. And that allows you to expand over time. And that allows you, in our case, to add more battery capacity to your house, which means shifting your energy, saving more on bills, but really right sizing it to the need.

Silas Mähner (14:39.918)
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And then I guess maybe just to back up, so in case anybody's not familiar, there are a lot of people who are also trying to save their energy bill by kind of – they have – like if you have a Tesla Powerwall system, right? You're gonna pull for the battery at the times and the energy is the most expensive and then obviously just from the grid at the normal times. Maybe you could give some people a little bit more background on these demand response programs and how you guys will also plug into those.

Absolutely, yeah. So what does it mean to save money on your energy bill? Kind of a nebulous concept. We don't have to go all the way into the weeds since no one likes talking about their, you know, sort of rate structures and utility bills. You see the eyes gloss over, but I'll make it dead simple. You know, it comes down to charging and using energy when it's cheap. Now, if you happen to have solar, that's free. You're generating that at home. You want to use as much of that as possible. And the value of a battery is it can soak up solar.

and then use that stored solar energy at night or when loads are high. Now, in a lot of states, and more and more states, we have variable pricing for electricity. So during one part of the day, electricity is expensive, during another part, it's cheap. Same idea, you can arbitrage that, you can charge when it's cheap, and then use the stored energy to power your refrigerator, your HVAC, when electricity is expensive and save money that

And then the third way, which is pretty exciting in our world is what you mentioned, demand response or related kind of cousin virtual power plant. The idea there is you've got these smart grid connected devices, batteries in your home. The grid can really benefit from that flexibility when it's strained. It might be the hot summer day where everyone's running their air condition. There are actually programs administered by

utilities and their partners that will pay you to either offset, you know, reduce load. That's kind of the classic example, like turn down your air conditioning system a few degrees, but even better with the battery, you don't have to compromise by turning things off. You just shift that load to run from the battery instead of from the grid. And, you know, you, as the occupant, you actually like don't even notice the difference except for the fact that, you know, you get credits on your bill or you may even get

Cole Ashman (16:58.594)
a little bit of extra kind of revenue stream coming in from that device.

Yeah, I think this point touches on the point that I think is most important about climate tech adoption anyways is this idea that we, you can't necessarily change human behavior. Like it can happen, but usually it's not intentional, right? It's like the iPhone comes out and everybody's now, you know, on social media, but or different things like that. But you, in this case, don't have to change human behavior to still get the benefits, right? So we're going to get more flexibility for the grid, which is getting more more strained by the day. And

the consumer has no real difference. They just plug it in, get it set up, right?

Yeah, and you know, this is a qualm I've always had with quote unquote climate tech. You know, it's just like, let's be honest, the world that we live in, that's not something that resonates with everybody. And you know, I have my opinions, others have their opinions, but what can we all agree on? Comfort matters, convenience matters, safety matters. I want to protect my family and the outage. I want to be less dependent on third party systems. I want to modernize my home and I want to feel safe and comfortable at all times.

And if I can save money while doing all of that, even better. know, this is what these products offer, whether it's electric vehicles or this home energy product category that we're building in. It's just about better ways of building and upgrading our homes and our businesses. And I don't see anything contentious about that. It's really nothing but upside. So even though, you perhaps certain, you know, California based startups have

Cole Ashman (18:31.714)
have done a lot of vocalizing about the climate space. And like, there's real value there. think, like, let's be honest, this is really about improving quality of life.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think there's a couple of points I want to just maybe highlight because we've already touched on them briefly. If you want to add anything, you can. But I guess one is this, the fact that with your solution, you don't have to have any permitting, right? So if you're going to add a big huge battery to your home, I'm pretty sure most places you have to get some sort of permitting, Maybe in all places, but probably a lot. This avoids that, Entirely? No permitting required?

And let me be clear, like we're not cowboys. We really respect the codes and standards that have made this industry safe and what it is today. And we're testing our products to all of those standards. But the reality is when 50 % of the cost to get the centralized system is soft cost, meaning not the hardware, but it's labor, red tape, permitting, and this can add months to the process. Building departments are all backed up.

you know, it's not about being cowboys and kind of like avoiding, you know, well-intentioned system. It's just about building things in a way that meets people where they're at. You know, for the same reason, you don't have to pull a permit to replace your washer and dryer. We're like, why, why do you need to do that for this kind of battery system for this energy upgrade? It requires a new way of building and a new way of thinking about these products. but you know, there's, there's nothing, there's no reason that, that it can't be done in today's kind of world.

the benefit of that is no permanent.

Silas Mähner (20:09.038)
Yes, I mean, so there's the example of time but also cost, right? There's so many cost savings if you just go with this way and you guys have built it at a really affordable price for pretty much everybody. The other thing I wanted to get your – I should clarify one thing too is this is a slightly smaller battery than a Powerwall, right? That's obviously a pretty hefty system. What is the actual amount of time that it could say, for example, keep your refrigerator running?

Yeah, you know, so it's smaller on the unit basis, right? So one power wall, which is the smallest unit of power walls where you would start is 13 and a half kilowatt hours. Don't fret the number of that doesn't mean anything to you. Ours is 1.6. So we're, know, a ninth the battery size of a power wall. But again, the beauty of our system is that it can be built out. So you can actually scale it, you know, larger than a power wall system. We're able to turn entire apartment complexes.

into batteries by coordinating up to hundreds of these distributed batteries. So our starting unit and our module is smaller, but just in the way that these other centralized batteries can scale up and you can add more, we're the same. The value of being smaller is you can focus on protecting what's most important. So a fridge, know, to answer your question directly, it's about 30 hours of backup power in an outage for an average refrigerator. And that can be higher.

You if you click on another battery module, we have what we call an expansion pack, double that. can be higher, you know, indefinite if you connect a plug-in solar panel to our device and recharge it daily for that multi-day outage. But ultimately every fridge and appliance and you know, how you use it is different. And that's where the software comes in. So we can predict and detect how the usage will change and actually give you a real time live updating estimate of backup time.

And that can be on the beautiful display screen on our device or on your phone. Perhaps you bought this for your mother-in-law, and you're not at her place during the outage. And you want to have peace of mind that she's protected. It's this really important kind of software layer that actually takes this from some hidden piece of infrastructure that you forget is there to something that you can count

Silas Mähner (22:26.062)
Yeah. So, okay, that's good. I really appreciate the answer there because a lot of people will be like, you know, how much could I actually do, right? That's a really good point. You can stack them and obviously you can also solve the need with just one because I feel like in most cases, right, an outage is probably not going to be 30 hours. At least I haven't ever had those growing up. So I want to combine a couple of things here. So we've got, we keep seeing, you know, we talked a little bit about climate and how we're not necessarily focused per se on the climate issue in terms of your pitch.

But the climate things that are happening around the world, especially with the EU, with heat waves, there's just a really large rise in demand. If I'm not mistaken, it seems as though even though the EU is very much anti-AC, a lot of people are gonna start moving that way and get air conditioning units. But on top of that, we have kind of policy tailwinds and headwinds in the EU. We've got some tailwinds in the US, we've got some headwinds. Can you just speak to these broadly, these major trends and how it's affecting your guys to go to market or what you foresee in the next coming, you know, couple years?

Absolutely. You know, the reality is the folks operating the grid know the challenge that they're up against and the missing piece to improve grid stability amidst all these climate disasters and the rest is flexibility. You know, and that can exist from extra generation to handle everyone's air conditioning turning on or it can exist via that and the combination of smart load control and the value of

our system being all the way at the edge next to the load is we have a relationship with that device. We can control it in a way that doesn't disrupt the occupant. So flexibility is key, and no one really disagrees on that. The need to get batteries on the grid, think is also very, very well understood in this space. And there's a lot of incentives, both in the US and in Europe to do that. The way that we think about our power grid and regulate it is very different than Europe.

And I would say generally household and consumer behavior is a bit different. know, things skew a bit more smart home kind of participatory in Europe, whereas in the States, because we have worse outages, things skew more towards self-sufficiency. We also have very high bills. So energy management, you know, from the headwinds and tailwinds standpoint, the let's just talk about the U.S. for a second, the dominant, the dominant tool

Cole Ashman (24:53.144)
for kind of battery storage and solar for residences has been the investment tax credit, the ITC, which is a 30 % federal tax credit for solar and battery systems that you can claim. The recent shakeup with the Trump administration is that 25D tax credit, the 30%, is going away for certain residential systems unless they're owned by a third party, things like you're leasing your solar system kind of thing.

For us, like I think that's challenging for the broader industry, especially when these whole home garage systems are 20, $30,000 plus, 30 % makes a big difference. For us, we didn't wanna build a system that was dependent on tax credits and dependent on incentives. That's cream on top. So what are we focused on? We're focused on lowering upfront costs by modularizing the system so that you can decide just what's most important to you.

And you aren't pushed into kind of doing everything at once, even if, because what you care about the most might just be wifi and fridge, you know, so delivering that in a cost-effective way. Now the value of building the system in infrastructure grade way and intelligent is we do have utility partners and the rest who are offering incentives for this type of product. And that's, an emergent tailwind, another emergent tailwind for this category of plugin devices, some call them balcony solar.

is regulation that's opening up the ability for these devices to exchange power with the grid. So you can produce solar that's plugged into an outlet and actually send that power back to the grid and use it to lower your energy bill. This is a trend that's been running strong for a while in Europe. In Utah earlier this year, the first bill was passed to of pave the way here in the States. And again, that trend is called balcony solar and there's a lot of

folks fighting the good fight there. And I'm pretty bullish on the trend taking off myself. And I think it will democratize what it means to have solar power, what it means to take energy self-sufficiency into your hands, even if you're a renter.

Silas Mähner (27:06.476)
Yeah. Is this something that has to happen mostly at the state level or is it just being done with utilities to say, we're going to promote this?

So this is another big difference between Europe and the States is we have a very fractured kind of way of doing things. So when it comes to permitting and the rest, every building department of which 4,000 plus in the US can regulate as they see fit. We have national codes and standards, but they're adopted by the local agencies and enforced by the local agencies at different rates. And they make their own amendments and effectively make their own rules.

Europe has a more centralized way of doing things. That's one reason why that balcony solar trend took off in Germany. had support from the national regulating body. So the short answer is, in the US, things tend to move inch by inch rather than all at once. But for emergent trends, that can be a benefit. What we found with Powerwall and with Span is there are forward-looking utilities and forward-looking agencies that say, yeah, I know there's not a black and white

know, set of standards written for that, but this is a good idea and we want to be the first to implement it. And you can build coalitions that way. And that's often how the national kind of codes and standards get updated. So, you know, I'd say blessing and a curse to be in that fractured regulatory environment in the U S but, you know, it, we're used to building products that way and we don't mind it too much.

Yeah, no, but it does sound like in general, you know, there's the persistent issue of utilities just constantly running into challenges about being able to meet demand. know, kind of, I would say, I would assume, I actually haven't checked the data on this, that more more blackouts are happening in the U S it's happening more frequently. I guess I just had a curiosity. I know you don't have a crystal ball, otherwise you probably wouldn't be on this podcast, but, what do you actually perceive that?

Silas Mähner (29:01.134)
most utilities are going to actually be able to solve these kind of these outages outage problems in the future or is it just going to keep getting worse and worse and worse because of all the new demands coming on the market?

So I'm an optimist, so I'll answer optimistically. do think, you know, five or 10 years from now, we'll live in a world where power outages aren't affecting homes and businesses to the same degree they are today. We're kind of in this transition period where we're very reliant on this old centralized grid and we haven't yet upgraded our homes and buildings in a way that they can take care of themselves in the outage. I don't think it's going to be entirely the utilities that are solving it, but they have a huge, you know,

role to play in this, both in modernizing the grid and the poles and wires and grid scale solar batteries and perhaps nuclear. But I also think we have to attack it from both ends. So our view is upgrade from the edge out, meaning starting behind the outlet and pair that with upgrades that need to happen on the larger distribution grid as well. And utilities can play across that space. There's been lots of

history of them discounting and incentivizing products like smart thermostats and those are the conversations that we're having with our class of product. In some cases, utilities are also interested to give this kind of technology away for free because it brings them, you know, so much value, more value than the cost of the device in some cases. So if we're doing it right, we're doing it together. But, you know, our view is we don't necessarily all have the luxury of waiting for our local.

utilities and regulators to get with the program. So we want to give people solutions that they can solve themselves. But also, should they opt into allowing their device to help support the grid and make some money in doing that, why not? Because that just benefits everyone.

Silas Mähner (30:55.468)
Yeah, and the beauty is again, even if they do solve the challenge in the near term, your product still offers the people the ability to have the cost savings, right? So at the end of the day, it's still a great outcome.

That's right. know, nobody nobody's going to upgrade their home for the greater good if they're not getting something out of it. You know, it's just not the world we live in. And thankfully, we don't have to live in that world because there's so much value for you as an individual in doing this kind of upgrade to to your home. The fact that you can get paid to help the grid, I think on top.

One thing I am curious about is, don't know if you guys have looked into this or have data here, but have you compared in places like South Africa where they have rolling blackouts, or brownouts, don't know how they call it, it's a very common occurrence. Like, hey, I can't meet it this time, I'm going to have no power. Have you guys been able to see how people compare your system to, I don't know if they use generators right now, what do they use as backups? Have you seen the cost comparisons and can this really solve that for a comparable or better cost?

Yeah. And, know, there's no one size fits all solution, which is why having all this tech work together is super important. But generally speaking, let's just compare against generators, which is the incumbent way that people solve this kind of thing. One of the biggest challenges is fuel supply for those generators. So, you know, and that's true if you're in, you know, a developing country or if it's post storm. mean, I grew up in Louisiana, very familiar with hurricanes across the Gulf Coast. One of the biggest pains is with your generator.

If power's out for long enough, the gas station's not going to able to pump gas. So you end up spending the entire day hunting down fuel when you could be repairing your roof or cleaning up your yard or, you know, checking on your neighbors or whatever it is. So, you know, if we think about kind of total cost and effort of solution, you know, buying a generator in some cases may be cheaper upfront, but the effort to kind of maintain it, you know, repair it, fuel it over the lifetime is generally more expensive.

Cole Ashman (32:57.208)
than these battery systems, which can charge from cheap grid electricity or from free solar electricity, especially when the sun shines the brightest after the storm clears kind of thing. So that's how I think about it. Again, no one size fits all solution, but cost for this tech has come down far enough that it's generally a better net solution, I would say, than last century's technology.

Yeah. And I think – I don't know exactly the nuances about generator – know, gas generators but I do know that from owning some classic three-wheelers that you can't exactly expect gas to be stable for a super long time. You have to so if your generator is sitting there for a long time and then all of sudden you need to use it, you actually may be out of luck, right? So it's not like can store it up and stash it.

like sitting around collecting cobwebs in the garage and then, you know, the moment you need it, you go to start it up and the starter battery, you know, the gas has gone bad or something like that. And, you know, I would just kind of relegate that to that's last century's technology. Yeah, you know, I'm not an I'm not an anti combustion engine person by any means. But, you know, I think when it comes to the peace of mind that you want for backup power, like, why leave that to chance? Why? Why deal with the hassle of

Exactly, yeah.

Cole Ashman (34:16.226)
fumes and refueling and noise and you know, like, yeah, we talked to lot of customers and we hear this over and over again.

Well, there's also so many moving parts with any kind of engine. So it doesn't make a lot of sense when it's it's very, very difficult. And especially if you're not using it regular basis and maintaining it properly. And most people nowadays don't know how to do any of that. So it becomes very difficult. And even if there was maintenance with a battery setup, you are going to be using it on a daily basis anyway. So you'll know if there's issues probably prior to needing it, right? Let's shift a little bit into your go-to-market strategy.

Can you kind of walk us through your mentality around how you're gonna sell this? I don't think we've mentioned the price of the unit, like the base unit itself right now, so maybe we can talk about that and just how you're thinking about going to market with partners, direct to consumers, cetera.

Absolutely. Yeah. The base unit is 1299. And we're, like I said, we're excited to be working with utilities and other folks who are, you know, discounting the product and the rest. I think getting that cost to a point where truly everyone can access it is going to be incredibly important. But, you know, out of the gate, that starting point's a lot cheaper than, you know, your $20,000 fixed system. And actually on a unit economic standpoint,

the measure would be dollars per energy stored or dollars per kilowatt hour after installation. We're about 30 % cheaper than the central fixed battery because we cut out all of that unnecessary installation and setup cost. So that kind of gives you one answer in terms of go-to-market. We have this really unique ability to support self-install. And the analogy that I often use is like the internet.

Cole Ashman (35:57.208)
products, the IT products we have in our home and how that's changed in the last 15, you know, 10, 15 years. It used to be you need a professional to come out and run coax cable and perhaps, you know, run ethernet cables through the wall to a switch plate. And you have all of these fixed devices. That's kind of what batteries and power products look like for the home today. But of course, no one does that for internet, right? What do you do? You buy a Google mesh or an Eero mesh.

and you just plug them in across the home to extend coverage. You do it yourself, know, set up takes minutes. That's our view in the kind of battery space as well. So, you know, we have this ability to kind of sell directly, go direct, and we have pre-orders that are active on our website. Now, refundable $99 deposit, if that strikes a chord with anyone who's listening. But also you've heard me mention infrastructure grade. We've talked about demand response and the rest.

We see a lot of value in partnering to get this product out into the world and there's a lot of interest from partners across the incumbents, like utilities who are really familiar with this kind of tech from solar installers, but also home contractors that might work in HVAC or other areas that aren't traditionally offering batteries because they don't want to deal with the hassle. But their customers are asking them for backup solutions and they see this as a way to offer more to their customers.

Other examples, know, multi-tenant, property owners, property managers, enterprise customers, restaurants, small, medium business restaurants who really think of this as insurance against food spoilage. We're forming partnerships kind of across the board. And really it speaks to how universal the need is for, you know, reliable power and, you know, energy management.

Yeah, I like the fact that there's so many, I guess, possible customers, right? The TAM is pretty large, if you will. I am curious though, so is it primarily just like, we're going to sell hardware or is there going to be subscription costs? Are you going to ever go the route of kind of operating the assets as a kind of a distributed resource and then selling? I forget exactly the terminology, but basically getting paid by the utility to operate those, the virtual power plant.

Cole Ashman (38:12.898)
There's, many models here and like candidly, we're kind of exploring them all. But, one thing I'll say is out of the gate, you buy the hardware, you know, we're not going to nickel and dime for basic usage kind of thing. So there's no subscription costs to monitor the system and to use it, you know, to get that backup power that you're paying for, just like you wouldn't with, you know, a generator or something like that. All of the value, you know, the recurring value sits on top of that base platform, which means it's kind of an opt in model.

And you described it, right? It's operating this asset that the terms virtual power plant taking hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these batteries across the distribution grid. And when, you know, energy prices are high, sending power and managing power in a way that kind of looks like a big generator, but you're doing it with all of these distributed devices. It's a trend that sort of has been in full swing for a couple of years now.

and yeah, we absolutely see, see the opportunity there. but one way again, by analogy to think about this, I would point to products like, you know, your iPhone or your Mac book, right? Of course we're generating revenue from the hardware sale, but at the end of the day, we see an ability to build a platform platform on top of which other services can be built.

you know, and you and your neighbor and the person in the state over maybe leveraging different services, demand response, smart monitoring and the rest. But it's the hardware that allows you to do that. It's our kind of distributed software operating system, our OS that works across all of these batteries that allows you to do that. in that sense, it's a platform, even though, you know, hardware is a big piece of the platform.

So in general, just to get to the simple explanation would be if you've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of these batteries and you can operate them and help the homeowner, you know, if they opt in to be part of this, they will get savings on their electricity bill, probably even some sort of like participation. At some point, we'll have bi-directional grids. I would say it's probably going to happen with most grids, right? Where they can actually be selling energy back to the grid as necessary. And you'll basically take a tiny percentage to operate it for free effectively, right? So they don't have to pay anything upfront.

Silas Mähner (40:32.152)
but you'll be able to manage that in the backend. that's a very interesting model. haven't, I don't know if I've seen this done on a kind of like a smaller unit like this. So it's interesting to see this kind of perspective. Obviously there's the idea of doing this with EVs, which to me is like, it just feels like a bigger thing. But I really appreciate that. So one thing I would be curious about is how far have you guys gotten with discussions with utilities to get these things going? I know that, you know, it's kind of a...

a stereotype that utilities move very slowly. they're focusing on reliability, so I understand why. But what have you seen in that space? Are they pretty reactive to this? they very open to it?

They're very open to it and not all utilities are kind of created equal. You've got the very large, you know, statewide kind of operators that do tend to be a bit slower moving, but often have really large innovation budgets. And then you have smaller regional co-ops and, you know, players that can move a bit quicker. Sure, they may not have as many meters as the big folks, but they can move faster. you know, finding the sweet spot there.

And I'll say we're having conversations across that spectrum. You know, there are some very forward thinking large utilities that have seen the success of programs with EV chargers and other devices and are looking to expand. And then there are also, you know, smaller regional players who perhaps are most focused on reliability and resilience, especially for low and medium income customers for whom like putting in the $20,000 system just doesn't pencil.

know, PILA obviously offers a more focused approach to reach more customers. Beyond that, some of the utilities that serve urban areas, think, you know, New York City in place that also, again, can't get power walls for one reason or another. Yeah. Quite excited about this type of product and, you know, why are they excited? Again, batteries are, you know, to make a mass generalization, one of the best things you can do for grid flexibility. Controlling loads.

Cole Ashman (42:38.338)
you shutting off your air condition, technically great, but who wants their AC shut off on the hottest day of the year? You know, the value of the battery is this can all be kind of seamless in the background without any comfort or inconvenience hit.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, one, I like to ask whether for anybody doing hardware, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges for scaling up to mass production and maybe just touch briefly on how you're planning on doing that, whether or not you'll do it yourself or through contract manufacturers initially.

We are in the process, and the reality is even if you work with a contract manufacturer, you have to be heavily involved. It's always the case, and you can be working with world-class manufacturers, but you have to treat your products with the scrutiny that you need. So we're doing a lot of it ourselves. We are working with partners on some extent, which is

true of any company in this space. And yeah, we're, you you mentioned at the top of the call, we will be shipping products later this year. So very much in that process now.

Hey guys, Silas here. Welcome to the Talent Tidbit part of the show, sponsored by Earth Tech Talent. In this next section, you're going to hear a little bit of Cole's breakdown on his philosophy on team building and core lessons that he's learned when it comes to talent during his building of PILA. If you want to hire well and build a team of A players just like Cole is doing, reach out to Earth Tech Talent today. They specialize in placing top clean tech talent in the US and they do it for about half of what other search firms charge.

Silas Mähner (44:13.88)
To get in touch, reach out to earthtechtalent.com forward slash contact. That's earth-tech-talent.com forward slash contact. And they will be in touch with you to help you build out your team. All right, back to the show. Okay, nice, nice. Yeah, I'm excited to see it. And maybe we'll have you again come on the pod as you guys scale up, you know, or you've reached some scale and you see, you know, what are the challenges because I think there's a lot of hardware founders who are, you know, building related things that could, you know, learn from those lessons, right?

Let's talk a little bit about talent. So I, working in town, I'm very, very passionate about this, but what is your philosophy about team building and any of the kind of core tactics that you've taken as you guys grow to try to be very cash sensitive, to not increase burn too much, while still getting the best people involved?

I mean, it kind of comes down to that last piece, best people, right? You know, we're very fortunate to have hired the team that we have. A number of us have worked together. So what does that mean? Like relationships are so important in this space, you know, building out that network of professionals, you know, that you can trust and call on. And the beautiful thing at the early stage is it doesn't all have to be full-time folks. You know, we've brought in a number of advisors and folks part-time.

to kind of help surgically on certain projects and just lend their expertise in a way that is very cash efficient. You can grow too quickly. I think that's no secret in the world of startups. Obviously, you need to be growing with the need, but my personal view is growing ahead of the need can create drag, slow down, inefficiencies, and you can lose that startup superpower of being incredibly nimble.

and having information flow, you know, very freely between a small number of folks and kind of maintain velocity in that way. awesome people growing with need, you know, really thinking about each person that you're adding as one of the most important decisions that you can make in building a company. Cause sometimes hiring the wrong person is worse than not hiring anyone at all. Yeah, I think that that's probably it for the core principles. It's pretty simple.

Silas Mähner (46:28.846)
Yeah. I appreciate that. think that's, I would just encourage anybody listening to take this to heart because this reflects very accurately what I've seen in the head-on thing space is that this tend to be the best principles to follow. you know, it's basically an ad for my services, I guess, or at least have a chat with me and I'll tell you these same things. But I think this is really helpful. I like the idea of just basically only, especially only hiring as you need it. When you do that though, obviously there's just so many things to do at the early stages.

Do you find this as a kind of forcing function to make sure that you're working on the most important things because there's such limited time?

think so. That's certainly one output of it. And the challenge with any company, but especially at an early stage startup, is deciding what are those most important things and being ruthless with deprioritization. That next shiny opportunity, whether it's a potential partner, whether it's something to add to the roadmap, can be massive distractions and

having the North Star of what do we absolutely need to deliver and delivering that with exceptional quality, you know, is something that we care about a lot.

One other thing I'd like to get you comment on, you mentioned that the network of the people you've hired was really important. Can you give any possible comparisons of when this, because obviously you guys, it sounds like I focus on that, but maybe in the past companies you've worked at where there was, we hired somebody who had great skills but did not have the specific network and maybe just compare and contrast those two kind of outcomes?

Cole Ashman (48:02.818)
Yeah, know, network aptitude. think just like having the wrong person in the seat can be really distracting. know, you don't always know that, right? It's impossible to kind of predict completely. I mean, one thing that I've done at PILA and have done when hiring in past roles is trying to develop a relationship with the potential hire as early as possible. you know, the, again, biasing to only full-time hires is, can sometimes be a downside. doing

contract work to kind of get to know folks or spending the time, you know, to understand like what they're motivated by early on can really do a lot for you in terms of making that decision.

Have there been any kind of like super shortcuts that you guys have been able to have because of people's, you your talents network where they were like, hey, all I have to do is put in one call and I've got this sorted out rather than searching around for months to figure out, you know, who are we going to use for the supplier agreement or whatnot?

Yeah, you know, and like, there's no, I don't even know if there's a piece of advice in this, just not the honest answer is, know, you work with folks and then you build trust and relationship with them and then you call on them, you know, for, for the need. And that's largely been the story of PILA. Like we have our, you know, top one, two, and three picks for roles, for partnerships, for, you know, advice, advising and,

I'm happy to say we've pretty much gotten our first pick of all of those things, but you know, it's just, investing in the relationship and thinking of this all as a very long-term kind of thing is what I often coach people to do because you never know when you're going to need to like pull in, you know, this sort of odd expertise from a past project or, you know, ask for a favor for an introduction or something like that.

Silas Mähner (49:53.612)
Yeah, I mean, there's just so much underrated value that you can get because especially if somebody like you who worked with Tesla and Span, you have these really great companies and they're such a great network of people and you've seen a lot of things so you know what not to do and you can have people to call in. I always, like, you know, as somebody who talks to lot of founders, I always struggle with telling people not to start a company because they need that experience because I want people to start companies. But there's such value if you've kind of put in the years to have these other experiences and build a network.

because it makes it so much easier on the founding side. you know, obviously if you're a founder, don't be discouraged if you don't have that network, know, still get at it, but just know that if you're somebody who's been working, you know, for other people for a while and you've got a bit of network, you actually might have a severe advantage over, you know, those Stanford dropouts.

I guess what I'd say, it never stops. You know, it's not like sort of built up this cache, having worked at Tesla, actually think of it as a, you know, a thing that you build and maintain over time. So we're making new connections through the PILA experience every day and, know, working to maintain fast, fast connections. And yeah, I just think, you know, if this is an area that anyone who's listening is interested in building companies, like if there's one thing to focus on, it's people, you know, you can have the best idea in the world.

You can have flawless execution aptitude, but if you don't have people to kind of support the journey, you know, it's, it's not going

So in other words, for anybody listening who plans to start a business someday or start a startup someday, make sure you're building that contact flywheel. We're running out time here, so we'll start to wrap up here, I guess, with what are the core milestones that you guys are most excited for in the coming months or years?

Cole Ashman (51:35.766)
Let's start with years. mean, if we flash forward, the world that we want to see is one where every home and business is self-sufficient, meaning it can survive the power outage, but it can also kind of take care of itself from an energy management perspective. Think about every device and appliance in your house working together to save you money on your bills and to alert you when things are starting to go wrong. I feel like this is a long promised kind of future.

for internet of things for IOT. And I'm very bullish that adding in the energy layer is the way to get there. And that's how we will kind of go from kind of failed IOT 1.0, Wi-Fi radios and everything, but really useless software to incredibly smart technology built in by default. And we're excited to be that.

So in other words, if I can interject, so you're basically kind of viewing the future like, we are going to build these incredible IoT systems, but because we have a very specific use case and need with the energy side, we're going be able to get the market to pull this out of our hands and then we can obviously, you know, iterate and add things to it later on. Is that correct?

that's right. In other words, there's more value to that than just sort of niche monitoring. also monitoring without control is not that useful anyway. By adding in the battery and the energy side, you can also affect change and automate in a way that just sending you a ping notification to adjust your behavior doesn't really get to. And then the other thing is we're building this in a very intentional way, 10 year lifetime.

infrastructure grade monitoring controls protocols, because we don't see this as a fun widget. We see this as necessary infrastructure upgrade to modernize our grid and in doing so modernizing our homes. So adding in that kind of scrutiny into the design, it's just another kind of missing piece that we see.

Silas Mähner (53:33.548)
Yeah, this is very fascinating. Cool, well, I guess any final thoughts or where people can reach out? What's the website? Where can people pre-order one of these things?

Yeah, website is pela.energy or pelenergy.com. Like I said, pre-orders are open now. We're also hiring. So check out the careers page and we're grateful for folks who are following along. So thank you.

Absolutely. And that's P-I-L-A, just in case anybody is confused about the spelling. very good, man. I really appreciate you coming out. I think this has been great. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you guys achieve here because it's clear that you have a very good vision of what you're trying to build towards. So thanks for coming out, All right, that's wrap. Thank you guys for tuning in to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please do share it on social media. Drop us five stars on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're feeling extra generous,

Appreciate it. Thanks for

Silas Mähner (54:24.674)
Give us a subscribe on YouTube. are trying to get to 1,000 subscribers eventually. That'll really help us get there. So thank you so much. We also love your feedback. So if you do have any, you know, things that you really liked about the episode, future guests you want to hear from, drop it in the comments on the sub stack or on the LinkedIn post wherever you see it. Or you can reach out to Samuel and I directly. That's especially the best way to do it. If you have any problems with the show, things you don't like, things you'd like to see changed. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for tuning in and we will see you next time on Clean Techies.



People on this episode

Head Shot

Silas Mahner

Co-host
Head Shot

Somil Aggarwal

Co-host