🎙️ Pila on Volts: The Battery That Turns a Home Into a Virtual Power Plant

Home batteries have been commercially available for more than a decade. Less than 1% of US homes have one.

That's a strange result. Battery costs have fallen dramatically. Homes clearly value backup and bill savings. The grid needs the support more every year.

A big part of the problem is everything around the battery. In residential solar and storage, soft costs (permitting, installation, electrical work, customer acquisition) can still make up more than half of what a homeowner pays. We spent a decade making batteries better and cheaper while leaving deployment largely unchanged.

That was the starting point for Cole's conversation with David Roberts on Volts.

Pila approaches the problem from the edge inward. Start with a battery and compute node that plugs in anywhere. Put storage, sensing, and control next to the loads people actually care about: the fridge, the router, the medical equipment. Then let those nodes coordinate across the home.

The hard problem becomes coordination. How do all of those distributed assets understand what's happening locally, work together reliably, and present the building to the grid as one controllable resource? That's the layer we're building toward at Pila.

Cole and David get into all of it: why the install is the bottleneck, what "virtual power plant" means for a household, and where this goes as the grid breaks into millions of intelligent nodes.

Listen here →