E135: The Battery That Pays You Back with Lunar Energy

Home batteries are having a moment, but for years, getting one meant cobbling together a solar panel from one company, an inverter from another, a smart panel from a third, and hoping they'd all play nice. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly takes a field trip to Mountain View, California, to visit Lunar Energy, where founder and CEO Kunal Girotra has built the fully integrated solar-plus-battery ecosystem he always wished existed.

Plus: a tour of Lunar's working showroom, where we flip a breaker, watch the app react in real time, and find out what happens when you leave the oven on during a power outage.

We talk about:

• Why Kunal left Tesla Energy to build a fully integrated home energy ecosystem
• How Lunar's modular, stackable battery blocks work (think Lego bricks for your garage wall)
• The real math on savings: how a solar and battery system can cut your bill by $2,000/year, and Lunar's AI adds another $500 on top
• How "virtual power plants" are actually very real, and why Lunar wants to rename them "distributed power plants"
• Why Northeastern states are leading on VPP policy, and what utilities in other regions need to change to keep up

Links:

• Lunar Energy: https://www.lunarenergy.com/
• Sunrun (Lunar's leading VPP partner): https://www.sunrun.com/
• Green Mountain Power: https://greenmountainpower.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show (and support future field trips): https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.