Things Have Changed
Things Have Changed
The Future of Energy Resilience: How Pila Is Making Backup Power Accessible to Everyone with Cole Ashman
What happens when the lights go out? For most of us, it’s just an inconvenience. But for millions of households and small businesses, outages mean life-saving medicine spoils, work grinds to a halt, and daily life becomes uncertain.
This week on Things Have Changed, we’re joined by Cole Ashman, founder of Pila Energy, who is on a mission to make backup power accessible to everyone.
From growing up in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to working on cutting-edge energy products, Cole has seen firsthand how fragile the grid can be — and how urgently we need solutions that work for all people, not just homeowners with deep pockets.
With Pila, Cole and his team are building portable, modular, and intelligent batteries that can protect what matters most — whether that’s a fridge, a CPAP machine, or your home office.
In this episode, we explore:
- Why today’s grid challenges (aging infrastructure, AI-driven demand, climate disasters) make resilience more urgent than ever
- The problem with traditional backup power and who gets left behind
- How distributed, plug-and-play batteries can scale faster than big infrastructure projects
- Why resilience should be a right, not a privilege
🎧 If you care about technology, climate, or the future of energy, this conversation will change the way you think about power — and what it means to stay resilient.
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Cole Ashman:We think that we need solutions that are both as smart as a Powerwall like battery, but as affordable as some of these smaller battery packs.
Climate s aing ai the resilience become a right not just a privilege.
Jed Tabernero:just about two weeks ago, my mom came and visited me here in Jersey City and when she was unpacking her stuff, she told me that she had a couple of medicines that she needs to put somewhere and she said, Hey, it needs to stay cold. This is a treatment that she gets on a weekly basis. It's quite important for her. And I thought, okay, let me just clear some space out of the fridge this. Kind of experience I had with my mother just thinking about where to put her medicine, something so critical to her that's gonna be in the fridge. I started thinking to myself, what happens if we lose power? What happens then? What happens to her medicine? And we would think about a blackout. These kind of cases where we live as something that's annoying. We're outta power for a while. Maybe we lose internet. But for some people, like my mom. This stuff can be actually pretty critical, right? It can be critical for us to continue to have power to keep her medications cold, and I'm sure she's not the only one. There's probably millions of people that rely on very important things that all you need to do is refrigerate. It could be a ccp, a P machine, it could be insulin. It could be really important stuff. And so that's where today's guest comes in. Cole Ashman is the co-founder of Pila, a startup that's re-imagining what home energy storage looks like. Portable, affordable, modular, and smart. It's not about powering your whole house, it's protecting what matters most when the lights go out. Kohl's helped build, portions of the Tesla Powerwall. He worked on span smart electrical panels. We're really excited to have him here today. Cole, welcome to Things Have Changed, podcast.
Cole Ashman:Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for the conversation.
Jed Tabernero:Great. I just talked about a quote unquote fridge moment for myself. What was your kind of fridge moment? What was that thing that really stuck out to you that made you wanna solve this specific problem?
Cole Ashman:It's funny you say fridge moment because for most of us, like that's the thing, that's the biggest worry when power goes out, and my, my, my story in the power space has been very resilient, focused my whole career. And I've always looked back to, my growing up in New Orleans. I lived through Hurricane Katrina, which is 20 years ago now, but one of the standout visuals post storm were hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of refrigerators discarded on the street, curbs in front of people's houses, because, this was an extreme event. Whether they were flooded or whether people had just left for weeks on end and, the meat had spoiled and whatever. This is like kind of this no turning back point when, you know, you're, you're not gonna scrub your fridge out and it's easier just to toss it. And, they sat for weeks and weeks. So that's an image that's burned in, in my mind and. I was fortunate in my career to work on products at Tesla, like their home battery, the Powerwall, and talked to lots and lots of customers hanging out in their garage while the installer was putting it in and just asking like, Hey, why,, why are you spending$20,000? What was your motivation? And they all had their fridge moments too, so it's these. These handful of really important things in our lives, in our homes, whether it's, internet, you work from home fridge, you're a new parent, and you've got milk in the freezer, or insulin, like you mentioned, a water pump, right? That means you literally can't turn your tap on if power goes out. There's several kind of really important loads and it's often one or two of those that motivate people to do the big upgrade and get a generator or a battery system that can be tens of thousands of dollars. Quite literally it was, it was a fridge moment. And the story of Pila, which we'll get into was just about meeting people with products that kind of fit their budget and their needs and moving away from this big, complicated multi-month upgrade that only homeowners are really able to do with permitting and the rest. Just something that's more akin to modern products. Mesh wifi nodes and Sonos systems and the rest that we're all familiar with that are plug and play and can scale up over time and, can come with you when you move. We just thought there was an opportunity to do that for power resilience, energy security, and a host of other things that we'll get into.
Shikher Bhandary:Thanks for that. Cole. uh, So Jed and I lived in California previously. I live in Texas. He lives in Jersey. All these three states. See rolling blackouts almost every year. Either it's due to drought, either it's due to wildfires, flooding with a lot of climate induced events. You're seeing the grid being affected and it just seems like this is gonna keep happening. Right. In terms of planned and unplanned outages in the US and I'm not even talking about globally because there was this whole. Weekend where Spain lost all of its energy, all of Spain. Yeah. So this has happened more often. The requirements of AI is just gonna go vertical if it already hasn't. So yeah, it just seems like this is such a great space to kind of dial in, because backup power isn't really a thing in the US for a renter or even a homeowner.
Cole Ashman:That's right. Like by the numbers, the, it's 12% of homes have a, a fossil backup generator. That's by and large, like the default solution. Which, it's the last centuries tech. It's noisy. There's a lot of reasons that it works and there's other reasons why it doesn't work. Like having to rely on a gas station to refuel when the gas station also often can't pump gas when power goes out, versus batteries which can recharge for free from the sun while you go clear your yard or, or whatever it is. There's kind of three, three major trends that we look at in this space that, that are, no secret, right? The first one is we have an old grid in the US we built the very first power grid, to American innovation at work, right? But now that means we've got this really out, out of date power grid and out of date business models in some cases for how to update it and out of date ways of thinking about upgrading it versus other places in the world. We see that as opportunity. The second one is load growth, right? So we're not in a business as usual mode where we're just hunkering down and trying to operate the grid as we have for the last several decades. We've got EVs we've got AI and data centers coming on with increased velocity, trying to connect to the. We're some have forecasted a doubling of load growth in the next few decades, which is astronomical. And of course, that has to be met with more generation. So the whole system's changing. And then the third one, which you alluded to is weather. You know, like we're living in this bizarre time where e every part of the country is now getting faced with weather events, whether it's, dichos and windstorms in the Midwest, whether it's fires out in California. Strengthening hurricanes in the south, winter storms in the north, it's just, it's everywhere. Right? And again, by the numbers, there have been more billion dollar weather disasters in the last three years than there were in the entire two thousands in the entire Katrina decade combined. So, it's not, it's not going away anytime soon. And all of these things together create this perfect moment, perfect time for better solutions that can be scaled really quickly, that can meet people where their need is at. And of course, that's what we're all about.
Jed Tabernero:Yeah. No, that, that's interesting because it's, you just pointed out the three things that make it a perfect time to innovate in this space, but some people would say that folks have already come up with certain solutions. Right. And this is kind of where I was really interested because what really I'm thinking about as a, as a key question when we're talking about the problems of solving this space is who's getting left behind? Right. Something that we really focused on in this research and something that I compared average cost and, how do you think about these people who need to solve this same problem, who can't afford an entire, power wall, right?
Cole Ashman:That's right.
Jed Tabernero:If that's the first at least solution that came to my mind. That's very public. Folks understand that there's a battery at home. You know, they get a Tesla, they get the solar panels and they get a Powerwall at home all installed for you to be able to afford just even the Powerwall, you mentioned it in the intro portion, it's like 20 to 30 bucks, 20, 30,000 bucks, right.
Cole Ashman:I wish it was 20 to 30
Jed Tabernero:yeah. Would've been a lot easier. But that's. If you look at the average US household income, right, that's maybe it's, it's like 60 K, something like that, that could represent anywhere from 20% to 50% of most Americans' income, right? You know, back to the question I was asking earlier, who's getting left behind? Well, it's the folks that can't actually afford the quote unquote traditional. Backup power, I guess we can call that traditional now. It's been around for a couple years, I guess. Um, and that's where, I think it makes so much sense to build more solutions that to your point, are more consumer friendly and that can scale. I think the Powerwall is scaling very slowly. Great piece of innovation, great piece of technology, but it's scaling very slowly, right. So, yeah.
Cole Ashman:Well let, and let's talk about categories of products, right? Like you just had an outage, you wanna solve it. You never want that to happen again. You wanna protect your family. This is often how this like buying journey starts for homes and for businesses. You mentioned Powerwall and Powerwall like products. These are big batteries that often go in the garage or bolted to the side of your house because it's a complicated electrical upgrade. You need professionals to do it. Electricians, their time is expensive and there's kind of a complicated permitting process to do these kind of upgrades. Just like any major, major home renovation, that's where a lot of that price tag comes from. The hardware, the batteries, all district costs have come down, but the total install cost for a Powerwall like system has kind of remained. Steady over the years to the point where now let's say you get a quote for$20,000 for, an entry level single Powerwall system. About$10,000 of that is soft cost permitting, design, sales overhead, all of the rest. Um. That's the premium solution, and it's, it's such an incredible solution. And if folks have a battery like that, or maybe they know someone who does, they, they know people rave about it because it really does feel like living in, this century, it's seamless. You don't even know the lights go off. It's connected. So you can be anywhere in the world and you just like really feel in control. It's, it's incredible, but it's hard to get right. So then, you start looking at, okay, well maybe I want a lower cost solution. Generators, natural gas, gasoline, diesel have been around forever. They're kind of the, the stalwarts, the incumbents in this space. Obvious downsides there. And then, you know, you look to the. Lower cost battery solutions. There's now a proliferation. You can go on Amazon and see, dozens and dozens of companies that sell these kind of camping batteries. Which, you know, you run an extension cord, you click a button. There's not really like a software, smarts element to most of these, but you, you know, they're more designed for the job site or kind of camping and they really look out of place in your home. The industrial design is like power tool, right? It does not feel like it should be
Shikher Bhandary:It looks like you're, you are able to like drill holes and plug anything into like a five socket. I know this because I'm literally gonna need it for a hiking trip this weekend.
Cole Ashman:And, these are great because they're low cost, they're durable but they don't really do anything for you other than backup power, and they're very manual, right? So it's kind of a clunky solution. At the end of the day, if you're talking about running extension cords, my grandmother's not gonna do that kind of thing. Right. The average person might buy that if it's the only option, but, but we don't think it has to be the only option. We think that we need solutions that are both as smart as a Powerwall like battery, but as affordable as some of these smaller battery packs. And the way that you do that is just building these systems with that infrastructure grade mindset. A power wall, but miniaturizing them. And that's kind of exactly what we've done with Pila. The first product that we've launched is a slim battery. Think meant to tuck above your refrigerator under your desk next to your sump pump in the garage with the chest freezer. Wherever power is most important to you, rather than one big system put in all at once by a professional. It's a small distributed system that can be set up, on piece by piece, room by room. And that is how you cut out all of this expensive costs and also how you bring in those people that you mentioned who are left behind the renters, the condo owners, the folks that just don't have, you know, the, the budget for a big system. And that's a huge, huge section. Of the population. There's, 130 million households in the US in total. 41 million of them are condos and multifamily, 45 million rent, so in total, that's about half of American households that even if they could afford a Powerwall, just can't get one because Powerwall is, really designed for the single family home with the garage and, rooftop solar and the rest.
Shikher Bhandary:One of the main advantages here is it not being hardwired. We can just kind of plug and play. That means the next time Texas has a freeze, I can connect my Xbox directly to a pela. Forget about the fridge.
Jed Tabernero:thinking about. Come on, man.
Cole Ashman:Yeah.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah. But yeah, Cole, you, you touched upon briefly about the mesh network. Can we kind of, dive a bit into the technology and what you think sets it apart?
Cole Ashman:Let's go one, one step deeper here. So outages are often how people start thinking about their home energy. The obvious other one, of course, is their bill. Right. And we're also in a world where power prices are precipitously rising. One in six households are, are already behind on their energy bills Out here in California where, power prices are rising incredibly fast. The retail rates are up 50% in the last five years. The, the load growth and data centers are driving this up even faster, right? So our view is just like with a Powerwall, backup power is one key pillar of, of why you want that system. And the other is that 24 7 value of helping you manage your bills, understand your energy, and kind of automate some of that. Unnecessary spend away, once you have, if you have a battery sitting in your house, don't you want it doing something for you 99% of the time when you don't have an outage? And that's, that's a systems challenge and a software challenge at the end of the day. So for us that's kind of core to our DNA, how do we turn this battery set of batteries into a distributed energy management system, into a brain that can actually uplevel your home save you money on your bill and sort of support, support the grid and create new revenue streams for businesses and, and homeowners while doing that, you know, so, so how do you do it? Right. Well, with the Powerwall system, it's like hardwired into your garage, you know, it's all, it's all kind of connected in and centralized. You can think about it like it's kind of a crude analogy, but you can think about it like getting internet, 20 years ago or 15 years ago. You have to have someone come out. There's a big box. They run a coax cable. It's, in one place and then you're running, ethernet cables through the wall to switch plates like that. That's the status quo in power today. But no one does that obviously in, in internet today, we all go out and buy Google Mesh, wifi and Eero, and you kind of ex build out the system based on your need. You know, you live in an apartment, maybe you need one, you know you've got the McMansion. Outside of Dallas and you've got, 15 mesh points. But the beauty of that is it's kind of customizable and people can build it out as they need. Another great analogy in this space that many people are familiar with is audio. Just like home audio used to mean speakers in the wall professionally installed with, remember the volume knob
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah. You have to go in like four different corners and turn on the Sabo, right? Yeah.
Cole Ashman:Yeah, and you've got this big amp in the closet and three years later it's out of date, and it's like that again. That's kind of the status quo in power, the power space. Our, our view is let's modernize the power space and create these nodes, which are batteries and energy measurement and energy control and compute. In one easy, beautiful package that you can distribute, you know where, where it matters most, and this could be five across your home, but this system is again, infrastructure grade because there's also need in multi-tenant. To serve hundreds and hundreds of different appliances across a building and for businesses as well. That's kind of how we see this evolving in the necessary next step to make it more accessible. You asked about the mesh, that's just the connectivity between all of these devices and, we talk about this is like IOT 1.0, internet of Things. That's like your smart fridge and smart washing machine. I've never met anyone who has ever used those features and I think I've met. More people that have just been annoyed by the fact that it's smart. So we have to think about like, how do we avoid that? What were the mistakes, that product manufacturers have made over the last decade in trying to jam smarts where they weren't useful? And a lot of that problem is connectivity. You have to keep it connected to your wifi when you change out your router, like everything disconnects. And we wanted to solve that problem from the outset. And one way you can do that is by keeping all of your devices connected kind of natively. So we've developed and, kind of patented this really interesting mesh communication network. At the end of the day, that's just a way to get all of these batteries across your home working together in concert, in a way that doesn't require complicated setup in a way that allows you to add more over time. But, when those batteries are working together, that's how you save money on your bills, and that's how you, give people more insight into their home.
Shikher Bhandary:When you say working together. It means like, say if it's nighttime, usually prices are lower at night than, say at 1:00 PM Hottest between one to like six right? During summer. So you are saying it would be smart in the way that say you have one P system connected to the fridge, one to your Xbox One to your.
Cole Ashman:Window Air condition unit, sump pump, you name it. Yeah.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah, so all of them would probably be smart enough to kind of trigger intake from the grid at a lower price point.
Cole Ashman:That's right. That, and that, that's a great way to think about this. Ultimately, it comes down to when are the batteries pulling power? When are they shifting that power to the devices that are connected to them? And how are they sharing insights about how all of these devices and the help of your home wiring is kind of performing. So, you know, for many of us, we have time of use rates, which just means powered. Prices vary throughout the day. So these, this coordinated system is aware of that and it can respond to those price signals to reduce your use of high cost electricity. And then of course, if you have solar or if you connect solar, that's free energy that you're generating at home. So using that to offset. Your expensive grid. Electricity is another great way to do that. There and the use cases kind of extend beyond that. This is gonna go a little bit into the weeds, but just to give you an example of how, fast software is changing our buildings take a commercial building that's adding ev charging, it may have never been designed for that high power draw. So if they want to add EV chargers, their options are one, pay for. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of upgrades to the wires coming into the building so that it can power all of the EV charging and everything else. Or option two, add what's often called an energy management system, an EMS or a power control system, A PCS. This industry is laden with three letter acronyms. So apologies for that. But the other option, rather than doing the kind of big hardware upgrade to the building is a software upgrade to the building and what that looks like. Is awareness of what's going on in real time.'cause usually our buildings aren't pulling at full capacity. Usually, there are loads like air condition and refrigerators and EV charging that come on and off throughout the day. And the classic way of designing for that is well shoot if they all come on at once. We gotta make sure the wires can handle it, but that creates a lot of inefficiency in design. IE extra headroom. So just by moving these loads around when things are using power, hey Ev, charger one just turned on. We need to throttle down EV charger two or ask the rooftop air condition system to reduce cooling slightly. And it's like kind of this balancing act, that allows you to use the existing wires in the building. And of course, that's just much, much cheaper than pulling new wires into every commercial building. So you know, the battery's working together. Another tool is this kind of software orchestration using batteries to offset the HVAC usage when ev charging turns on. So, and, and anyway, I'll stop there because, I can go on and on about this'cause it's incredibly exciting and we're really at the cusp in the industry with this. But that's what batteries working together means. That's what, our kind of novel mesh tech enables.
Jed Tabernero:That helps. I don't see that in any other UPS solution today.
Cole Ashman:Right, because they're all, lead acid and, basically designed for one job, which is when backup power is needed. They beep incredibly loudly and usually.
Shikher Bhandary:That's ingrained in my childhood, in my core memory, the beeping.
Cole Ashman:Yeah, so the idea, the concept of backup power is obviously not something that's new, but this idea of can you take that device and have it do a dozen other useful things for you, you know that's the problem to be solved, which at the end of the day means we just have to dig up less materials out of the ground and, make fewer batteries because the batteries that we have can do more for us.
Jed Tabernero:You mentioned a little bit earlier about how this can potentially relieve the grid. You see a future where a ton of folks have PA batteries at home and all of a sudden our grid doesn't need to get revolutionized. I mean, I'm sure that's still the main goal is to maybe modernize our old, really old grid systems, but this could be a potential solu, get everybody a, a peel battery, you know what I
Cole Ashman:Absolutely. I mean, that, that's why batteries are the topic du jour in the power industry. So this thing that I just described with like a commercial building and loads needing to be controlled, that exact same thing is how the power grid operates. But instead of individual air condition units, they think about it as big generators and, solar plants and cities, you know, and, and big industrial customers. So traditionally we've built our power grid to a large degree for some of these worst case scenarios. You know, we, we have to build supply so that on the hottest day of the year when everyone's running air condition and the rest, you know, we have enough capacity. That can create a lot of extra headroom. So, just like we were describing with that building, you can shift things around in time or maybe kind of take them offline by running them via batteries temporarily. That is a solution to you know, grid upgrade at the end of the day. And the same challenge exists. How do you reliably. Get all of these batteries to do what you want them to do when you want them to do it fast enough. And that that's kind of the core challenge. But relieving grid strain is absolutely something that these batteries can do. This past month in Puerto Rico, you know, which has had tons and tons of challenges with their power grid. I mean, major island-wide outages, going back to, you know, 2015 with Hurricane Maria and even this year there are a lot of Tesla power walls in homes in Puerto Rico. And through this really interesting thing called Virtual Power Plants, VPPs, another three letter acronym. You can ask all of those batteries to kick in. When there's not enough power from the big power plants and supplement them on those grid strain kind of, moments. And, you know, this is happening right now. This isn't kind of future theory. And all of those households that have power walls are, are getting paid for that performance. You know, this isn't just this isn't just a feel good thing. Like it's a real way to upgrade your home and your business and kind of help. Ultimately like lower the cost of owning that smart battery backup system.
Jed Tabernero:There's gonna be a lot of attention in how we. Figure out how to not overload the grid, and this is just one of the interesting ways to do it. You mentioned that you were chatting with customers as well, Coles, just to kind of figure out what people's problems were. Do you have a most interesting use case for somebody who needed Pila?
Cole Ashman:Well, we'll say the top ones, right? So fridge is kind of this hero use case that we already talked about. And, and by the way,
Shikher Bhandary:Bitcoin Mining. Mining
Cole Ashman:We have heard that, that, and
Shikher Bhandary:what?
Cole Ashman:Di different discussion, but you know, that kind of load is actually great for grid participation because it can scale up and down. But different topic, you know. So fridge is this really interesting one and again, one of the reasons why we think battery is closer to the edge at the appliance is interesting is'cause the data is more interesting there. We can tell you not only, oh, your whole home is powered, but your refrigerator and freezer are at these exact temperatures at this moment, and therefore your food is safe. So having that relationship with the appliance is another reason. You know that this approach we think is in some ways better than the whole home expensive system, and certainly better than the camping battery. That's an extension cord plugged into the fridge and has no kind of awareness, you know, no, no ability to tell you more. Peel is almost like an Apple watch for your fridge in, in that case. So that continues to be the one that really, really drives kind of adoption. But there are fun other ones too. Like we've heard the salt water, fish tank folks, the reptile aquariums, you know, and then, then some of like the, the more. The more obvious ones like window air conditioning work from home folks, you know, maybe they have their podcast set up. You never know. But it's really, really varies by household and, and by, by geography. And I think. Because of that, it's so important to have a flexible solution, and not say this is the window air condition battery, and this is the fridge battery. We have a, one, one size works for all of these loads, approach.
Jed Tabernero:Do folks qualify for the federal solar tax credit? When they get PI guess you, you probably have to have more than one unit to be able,'cause I think it's three kilowatt hours is required. Um,
Cole Ashman:and there's there's a world of complexity and tax credit. Short answer is this year. Folks qualify the OBVV Trump's bill kind of put, put an end to that benefit for federal tax credits. There are still, state incentives and utility incentives and the rest that are gonna continue to do a lot of work in this space.
Jed Tabernero:Gotcha. Because that, that might be something that also drives folks. One drives the price down, but just incentivizes folks in general to get going with this stuff, so,
Cole Ashman:absolutely. And it's been, I mean, it's a complicated topic. You know, the 30% tax credit has really done a lot to lift this industry. It started with residential rooftop solar. Under the Inflation reduction Act, things like batteries and electrical panel upgrades and the rest we're kind of covered more explicitly. So it's unfortunate that it's going away, but it's not a death sentence for the industry. Like this industry is one that can stand on its own two feet at this point. And like rooftop solar in the US is more expensive than most places in the world. You know, we're often above$4 a watt when places like Australia and Germany are sub$2 per watt. So you have certain folks, you know, who are, sort of expressing an opinion that this might be a necessary reset for the industry. There's been a lot of kind of predatory sales tactics, and it's kind of like the goldfish has grown to the size of the bowl where, you know, the cost of solar hasn't, isn't necessarily come down with that 38% tax credit that's getting passed on to the salespeople and the lenders and the rest. So, I'm optimistic about it and I know a lot of folks that, you know, we work with and talk to in the solar and whole home battery industry see a path through. I, I think we will counterintuitively see costs come down as tri price transparency becomes you know, a bit more business as usual in this kind of industry.
Jed Tabernero:In Europe, it's kind of been up and down with credits as well. I was just in Netherlands two weeks ago and my father-in-law has a strawberry farm. They grow strawberries on glass houses and the government is offering a 50% tax credit. To any farmers who put solar panels on top of their glass houses kind of insane, just paid for itself. But it was a huge project. You had, millions of hectares, of glass houses, and these policies change up and down, but it's just, that it, it's needed for some places in order to maintain the grid or just to future proof yourself,
Cole Ashman:absolutely. And when it's there it's amazing upside, and it does help drive adoption. But our view is. We don't wanna build products that depend on those kind of tax credits. And at the end of the day, the most important thing is what's the upfront cost? How can I get started with this? And what we've heard from our customers is, you know, the, the, our entry price point is 1299 versus a$20,000 Powerwall system, or, you know, often more expensive for other brands. And it's really that entry cost that is, you know, kind of the core. Dollars and cents number that people think about. And obviously 30% on a$20,000 system's, different than 30% on, a, on a much smaller system. So, a lot of different ways to slice this, but again, continue to be really optimistic that the local incentives and utility incentives and state incentives they're, they're ramping up, you know, despite what the current federal administration is is, is doing on the federal tax credit side.
Shikher Bhandary:Just the sheer demand of compute, of just consumption across the board will just ensure that batteries are always going to be needed and even more so going forward. So the one one point there, Cole, you, you mentioned about the Powerwall as well as the pillar, what appliances will largely run on this? We spoke about the fridge and all that stuff, but how long? Would they run for? Because I know we are talking about kilowatt r so I don't have a number of how much a fridge consumes in a day. In a week.
Cole Ashman:And you, and no one should need to know that number by the way. But you know, like, so, so the, the short answer is average fridge about 30 hours for our kind of base device. You can stack on a second one and get to 60 for that extreme. Case, but even better, you can plug in, a temporary solar panel and kind of recharge it day to day, to refuel even in the multi-day outage. For a window air conditioning unit that might be larger, using more energy can be kind of 12 to 15 hours. But, these aren't numbers that anyone needs to load into their brain because we make it. Very easy, your fridge, its profile. We have this, relationship with the device and we know what it typically uses, how you use it, and both on a, very friendly screen on the device. There's an app if you want to use it. We tell you exactly how much backup time you have left. And if you plug in, more, that will adjust. To help people ration that energy in the outage. Because at the end of the day, like, kilowatt hours eyes gloss over, and unfortunately that's, I think people in this industry are so passionate about it that they, they love talking in these terms, but you just lose the average person. So, our approaches. We're keeping your food safe. Here's exactly how much backup time you have. If you want to see more, there's tons of other stats under the hood, for most people, that's what it's all about.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah, that is such a good take on it because so I may have some background because I'm dealing with compute and data centers. So anyone says gigawatt, everyone's like, whoa, you know, eyes roll back. Right? But what does that mean to a consumer that literally just needs their fridge running? During a weather event, right? Is it gonna be there for a day, two days, a few hours, just to kind of get them through the event? Is it modular? That is amazing. I didn't realize that you could stack up multiple pillars to scale up. It literally feels like, the cloud, you can just add more servers and just kinda scale out, which is amazing.
Cole Ashman:Modular, flexible, right? That's what every, every company is talking about across hardware and software. And it's modular in two ways, right? You can stack kind of at the room level or the appliance level, Hey, I want my fridge specifically to run longer. Or like we talked about with the kind of. Mesh wifi node analogy, you can go room by room and spread them across the house to also increase kind of capacity for that bill savings benefit.
Shikher Bhandary:How's the reception been? Clearly are getting a lot of interest and it feels like the right time to be solving this problem. How's that interest been? I know y'all are, were fundraising, so how's that whole process going? Because again, we talk about it. Jed and I are in the hardware space and it. Expensive. Right. Hardware is, tends to be expensive, but would love to get your take on what, what are the vibes like in battery power, resiliency world?
Cole Ashman:Vibes are good. Vibes are vibes are very good, is the short answer. Um, we're, hey, we're, we're fortunate that, this is a very real need in the market and that's kind of been been reflected in our ability to. Bring on amazing people into the team and, raise money and, get, get orders for these units. So we're working as fast as we can to deliver them. Later this year we launched out of stealth in March at South by Southwest down in Austin. Um, incredible reception there. And, some of the conversations that. I think resonated most with me and the team weren't with your kind of typical tech enthusiast, early adopter, although like we have some very cool features there from the like home assistant integrations and the rest. But it was with, The grandmother, grandfather, who had never really even thought that they could have a product like this in their home. It was from the, all, all walks of life from folks in, the Midwest who had kind of maybe skewed more prepper style and had their bunker next to their house all the way to the, downtown Austin resident. Who was really interested in, the grid incentive program. So I think we're finding that this idea of energy security and energy resilience and self-sufficiency just kind of hits on like. Perhaps a very American kind of core identity. And obviously that exists elsewhere in the world, but especially here in this country, people want to be self-sufficient and I think we're being tested now more than ever with these outages and rising power bills. And it just feels like one of these areas that you know is out of control. And then you say, oh, well wait, I can bring this back into control. That, that's amazing. And hardware is hard. No, no ifs, ands or buts around that. But fortunate to be working with an incredible team here who have brought products to market at Apple and Amazon. And, a number of the team worked at Span on the smart electrical panel with me. Tesla Plus, our, our network of folks who have built products across the industry. Advising and, and the coalescence of. Brain power around this idea is really, what's making it happen. So feel incredibly fortunate that the timing is right and we've got the right folks to make it happen.
Shikher Bhandary:You mentioned both residential and commercial. Are y'all thinking expanding outside of just the residential aspect? Because the need is there, right?
Cole Ashman:Absolutely. I.
Jed Tabernero:And not, not everybody has the bank account or the wallet of Amazon to be putting generators and smart machines in their buildings and stuff like that. So I'm sure there's some commercial use cases that you're gonna find really interesting.
Cole Ashman:Absolutely, and we're talking with, mom and pop restaurant owners. We're talking with small, medium businesses and we're talking with the big enterprise customers. Look like traditionally energy storage for buildings has been like rigidly sectioned into residential, commercial, industrial, and there have been different product classes for each of those. Powerwalls for residential. Larger pad mount batteries for light commercial. And then like mega pack containerized, 40 foot shipping, container sized batteries for grid scale and, and industrial. In that kind of residential commercial space, we're finding that we kind of have this new ability to blur the lines because. This like mesh communication network and this distributed modular design allows us to scale up again from like one in your New York City kind of condo to hundreds of these across a commercial property or across a multi-tenant building. So absolutely both of those conversations and the ones that have got me most excited are some of these mom and pop. Shop type owners because these are folks who have never had the right products for them, and just have been left out. And as we think about, impact, we want to make sure that, it's not just the industrial customers and the commercial customers at scale that are protected, but also put the power in the hands of the people, where, where one outage could mean, significant financial strain for, a small business, a restaurant especially.
Shikher Bhandary:Okay. So this is amazing. I mean, I guess this is things have changed exclusive. So you have the PA, you have, different versions of that, and then you have a giga pila, which can handle everything in a small enterprise.
Cole Ashman:And why has no one done this? Right? The challenge is getting all of these things to work together is a really hard problem, and it's one that, we feel kind of uniquely able to put together given our experience in this space. But in our grandest descriptions of what we want to do, we talk about upgrading the operating system of our buildings. We need a new OS for power and what's going to power that? In the same way that you can't like run iOS 16 on a Nokia phone, we kind of need better hardware that enables the software. So our answer to the better hardware is this distributed plug and play compute plus energy control and, and energy storage. That's the hardware that's running in this, this sort of larger operating system across these batteries. And I think that's, that's what's most exciting to me as I think forward to the next five and 10 years is. Having smarter buildings that are not only resilient when it comes to power and kind of managing their bill, but also resilient from a compute, and a brain perspective. What's going on with building all these data centers and the way that we've kind of architected our information technology looks a lot like how we built the grid, in the early 19 hundreds with big, centralized. Big centralized systems, but instead of a big generator, it's a data center. Well, what happens when that connection, fails, whether it's something with your internet service provider or whatever, it's your building that's you've relied on to be smart and take care of you and the security systems and energy management. Does that just become dumb? We don't think it has to. We think by putting, smart focused kind of compute at the right points, you can actually have a. Smart offline building as well. And we think of that as resilience 2.0, power and intelligence. And of course that's not to say like no data centers should get built, but just like with the grid coming at it from both ends makes a lot of sense. The big centralized system for, obvious reasons. And then the local kind of resilience, self-sufficiency piece as well.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah, from reading your blog posts, and, Jed and I are big believers of abundance, energy abundance, right? We need to build nuclear power plants and solar and battery and literally just make sure that, we have access to power. As AI compute kind of starts becoming a sizable portion of the consumption. On the grid across the globe, right? So just talking about scale, right? These la these large AI labs are racing to build these multi gigawatt scale dcs. And to kind of put that into perspective, right? You know, our listener consumers out there might be thinking, okay, what does that mean? What does gigawatts even mean? Right? Training the latest AI model. Can power the ci a city the size of Atlanta for the same time period. That's the scale that we are talking about, right? So GPD five. Yeah. GPD five is, will be like powering Atlanta, right? Or Seattle or one of these, big cities, right? So this is very, very consequential for the, for the grid and everyone else, right? For society because ultimately we tap into the par for our livelihoods and our homes. So this trend is not going I think, I'm close to the source, but I was reading some articles about open AI's new cluster in Texas is at peak will be a hundred gigawatts us. Consumption. Peak gig consumption is 700 gigawatts. So we are like getting close. Now. That training cluster is not gonna be at that scale all the time, but even 10% of the entire consumption of us, the us power consumption is just. Outta this world, like just ridiculous.
Cole Ashman:right? Yeah.
Shikher Bhandary:And we are talking about 12 months. We've gone like in 14 months. Our, the scales have just 10 x like this. The scale on the graph has 10 x right? So this load profile is massive. The the training workloads. You mentioned something about being intelligent to know, okay, when the waves happen, right? And you, you're nodding to this, so I, I'm certain you know about this, where these training loads can go to a hundred to zero in a matter of an hour, right? So we really need software enabled smart systems to be able to, smoothen some of those. Those curves, right? The rising and falling from full load to idle. So, you mentioned many times during the call that our grid is not set up to, to handle this pattern. So wanted to get your thoughts. I mean, how do you see this playing out? Not just on the industry side, but also on the power resiliency slash battery side that you are actually championing.
Cole Ashman:Yeah, the, the crystal ball that, that, you know. That, that I would look into here. It is just batteries will be everywhere. Our view is that there's a lot of utility, there's a lot of value in getting batteries into buildings because of the bill savings and the backup power. Like having batteries right next to where the load is most useful is often the right way to do it. And that same. Sort of line of thinking extends to the data centers. We're seeing a lot of data centers coming online with batteries built on that same footprint, right? So they have large battery systems that, they're using to buffer their expenses as they're consuming energy and, create resilience for, for those systems. So I think, one optimistic view of this is this is a huge opportunity. You know, we now have this catalytic moment. Where for national security reasons for you know, economic reasons and the rest, we wanna get these data centers built. And because we're doing infrastructure upgrade and because we have the battery technology, it makes a lot of sense to put those batteries in with those new load centers. And those will become some of the most valuable batteries on the grid because they're co-located with the load. So, all, all of the super scalers, are, are thinking about this and we're seeing lots and lots of folks who are approaching data center build outs this way. And the extreme version of that is completely off grid data centers. Like we have a lot of red tape when it comes to connecting new things to our power grid. Those permitting timelines can be measured in months and years in some cases, which, ain't gonna work if you are trying to. Win the AI revolution. So, I think that's the, the sort of ul ultimate pendulum swing is that, people are just bypassing the grid in some cases. I, I don't think that's going to be the, um, default way of doing things, but just to paint a picture at, what tools are available today and how people are solving them with batteries. But again, it's never a, a one size fits all thing. We'll have batteries at the data centers. We'll have batteries in our buildings. The more batteries, across the grid, the more efficient we can operate our, our grid. So our piece to play in this is not necessarily. At the industrial scale today, but we see tremendous value in getting batteries across wider geographies of the grid. So not just the more affluent residential neighborhoods in the suburbs, but also dense urban areas and, commercial areas. And, the thought exercise that we ran at the beginning of founding Pila was, in 2024, we had like 30 gigawatts of, of battery capacity connected to the grid. And a much longer queue. But that 30 gigawatts, like 80 gigawatt hours if we imagined, one ki sized battery in every home, perhaps next to a fridge that gets you to almost 200 gigawatts of battery capacity on the grid. So that, that's kind of the power of distributed scale. And of course. We could in theory go faster, because, this is not a complex permitting exercise. It's just as easy as plugging it into the outlet.
Shikher Bhandary:So
Jed Tabernero:Cheese.
Shikher Bhandary:batteries at the edge is going to be future, or it's already here, but it's more about adoption.
Cole Ashman:Absolutely. I mean, we have batteries all around us. I bet you could look around your, your room and count 10 things that are powered by batteries. So, it, we're already there. But the next, the next chapter of this story. Is getting those batteries to work together and kind of support the whole energy system versus just being sort of a, one job only relatively non-intelligent device and our view is that batteries will be in everything, including appliances, and we're already starting to see that in some cases and will just be built into our buildings by default. But we also need solutions for rapid retrofit given how fast all of these trends are kind of emerging in front of us. Our sort of standalone battery that we've been talking about as our first product, and we've got a, you know, long roadmap beyond that includes larger, smaller. And kind of different packaging with within the systems in our buildings.
Jed Tabernero:But I, I do think that's the key, not necessarily to solve the compute problem solely, but generally to use this technology that's in front of us to our benefit, right? To benefit the entire grid rather than just our very one sole use cases. It's getting so crazy. I just have to point this out. The last founder that we interviewed is sending literally data centers to space to solve for the compute problem. Right. Get it off the grid, put it on space, rely on solar.
Cole Ashman:Talk about off grid. Yeah.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah, talk about Edge
Jed Tabernero:Yeah. Literally the edge. Right. Um,
Shikher Bhandary:Beyond the Edge. Yes.
Jed Tabernero:that's kind of what it's looking like to me is that you have to solve this problem of resilience. Right. And a lot of people have creative ideas on how to go about this, and we've been having them on our show, but this one is a quite unique piece of technology that we're super excited about. So I'm really thankful that you came on and shared with us today. Man, this was really cool stuff.
Cole Ashman:Thank you. I love the conversation and appreciative to to be able to share what we're doing with you and your listeners.
Jed Tabernero:But when, one of the questions that, that maybe you can help me address is when can I protect my groceries?
Cole Ashman:The most important question of all. Save for last. So first, first answer the company is Pela Energy. So type in Pila Energy in your browser, Pela or pela energy.com. You can get information about, you know, our, our product, the specs and we're posting quite a bit on our blog with. Product updates and timelines. Today, folks can put down a$99 refundable deposit to, reserve an early PLA unit. The demand has been incredible and we're excited to offer that, that pre-order option and we'll begin shipping units to, to customers later this year.
Shikher Bhandary:Awesome. And different geographies or just US based. Right now, because I'm telling you, I made some calls this morning. I was speaking to, to some friends and founders in in India and they're like, oh my God, this is amazing. So yes.
Cole Ashman:Absolutely, we've designed the, the tech so that it's kind of globally compatible. And we're, we're pretty excited to get out there. And, the European market, Australia, is, has been kind of seeded with these whole home batteries for a long time. But yeah, India, Latin America Southeast Asia, you talk to folks in, in Brazil and so many people that have a lead acid battery bank in their hallway, in their apartment. Right, because oftentimes power gets cut regularly, so they, they're solving these problems, but, certainly they're they're, they're looking in many cases for more integrated, smarter, elegant solutions. And we see those as, incredibly high potential markets and are really excited to, be able to offer products that aren't just, this kind of premium aspirational thing for maybe your, your future dream home. This is about getting started today.
To us a. Innovation isn't just about scale it's about access because the future of energy isn't only about mega projects nuclear plants o data centers it's about whether every household every business and every person can keep the lights on when it matters most you've been listening to things of. The view in this are of the. This Conversation es for inform purposes and should not be Financial.
