Latest / This Week in Solar / Building Hurricane-Proof Off-Grid Solar In a Box: Meghan Wood
Transcript
- Aaron Nichols: Hello everyone and welcome back to This Week in Solar. As always, I'm your host Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And my guest today is Megan Wood. Megan, will you explain who you are and what RIA power is? Meghan Wood: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on today. Really excited to chat. I'm Megan Wood, CEO and co-founder of Raya Power. So Raya Power, are, or we have designed the first integrated solar and battery appliance. And the goal is to get residential solar and storage to everyone who needs it in a more accessible way. So reducing a lot of those barriers that exist today to actually getting a solution. My co-founder is Nicole Gonzales and we've been working on this for Aaron Nichols: ExactSolar love to pay you $1,000 if you refer anyone who goes solar with us, and you don't have to be an existing customer. As energy bills spiral out of control and data centers gobble up power and raise prices for everyone, going solar is one of the best things a home or business owner can do to take control of their monthly spending. But the process can be overwhelming, especially when people start seeing news stories about solar companies that have gone out of business and left their customers high and dry. Meghan Wood: over a year, but officially a year. I come from Canada. I am the business side and Nicole is leading the technical side of the company. Aaron Nichols: It's hard to know who to trust with your property or to tell your friends about. That's why we work so hard to do right by our customers at Exact Solar. ExactSolar has been in business for 20 years. We're locally owned and we handle everything in-house. That means no subcontractors. Over the years, we've earned hundreds of five-star reviews and thousands of referrals from satisfied customers. If you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or know anyone who does, Amazing. I would love to zoom in on the word appliance there, because that's not normally something you hear around solar energy. Meghan Wood: Yeah, it's an important word to us. So when we started looking at this space, what I love so much about solar is this, you know, physical panel that you could put outside and make energy. Like that is so cool. And making energy means it can make money because now you're not buying from the utility, you're saving on your bill. And so I got so enamored by solar that we could make energy where you used it in an affordable way, but realized there was all these barriers to it. And so we talked to everyone we possibly could about Aaron Nichols: Use the link below to introduce them to us and we will take great care of them. If they go solar with us, you get $1,000. It's that simple. Meghan Wood: residential solar to understand why didn't people have it and what was excluding them from it. And the main reasons are you have to own your home, you need a newer roof, it's a big upfront cost and it can take a really long time. So you're kind of setting up for a construction project with not a lot of people can always access. So when we thought of how can we actually get this to more people, we thought this needs to be an appliance. It needs to be something that's as simple as getting a fridge or a table at IKEA or your wifi. Something as a renter you would get normally, something you could replace without too many hurdles. And so we use the barriers of an appliance to design our system. So we wanted there to be an aftermarket. So kind of one size fits all, you could sell this to someone afterwards. We wanted you to be able to bring this home and install it the same day within a few hours. We didn't want any home modifications required. We wanted it to be renter friendly. So we kind of looked at an appliance and thought, you know, how simple can that be and can we apply that to solar and storage? And those were all the design parameters that led us to our solution. Aaron Nichols: So to summarize and based on what I've seen about your company on your website, you can buy one of these units, you can bring it home, you can put it down anywhere that you get direct sunlight and somehow plug it into your home. The average person can plug it into their home and it will start saving you money on your bills basically immediately. Meghan Wood: Exactly. Aaron Nichols: So how does that work? Meghan Wood: Yeah, so how our system works is we actually connect directly to the core appliances that you want to run. So in order to avoid needing an interconnection agreement, which is something that requires you to be a homeowner, requires a timeline, requires you working with a utility. Right now that's a requirement to backfeed electricity through your home. So we didn't want to have that requirement in our system. We actually flow the electricity towards the appliances you want to run. So you'd plop our system down. I actually have a... Here's a mini version of it, our little model version. So you plop these down. Right now we start with three of them as our base system. Each one has a 450 watt solar panel on it. So you add up that base system to 1.35 kilowatts. And they also have integrated battery, inverter, communications, electronics, everything you need in there, as well as a ballast. So you plop it down. Once the ballast is added, it has the weight for up to a category three hurricane. So it's not going anywhere. Aaron Nichols: Amazing. Meghan Wood: and then you connect it to those appliances. So you'd have a smart strip, think where you could put a bunch of 120 volt plugs. Imagine that being cabled into your kitchen, into an elegant place where you'd then plug in your fridge, your fan, your wifi, stuff that you want to make sure will stay on if there's an outage. Now that will be automatically on in an outage. So they're now running on Raya, but Raya also has one connection point to the grid. So let's say you unplugged your fridge, you'd plug Raya in where your fridge was and plug the fridge into Raya. Now Raya can actually pull grid power towards it. So you can charge the battery on the grid and you can run the grid through our system to run that fridge if there was a few cloudy days. But as soon as there's sunlight available, you're going to be running that fridge on Raya's solar and reducing your bill that way. And as soon as the grid's gone, that fridge is now running on the Raya battery. Aaron Nichols: This is very exciting because I've been thinking about doing something like this with just bootlegs, Facebook Marketplace, solar panels and batteries for such a long time. So to hear that you guys are actually doing something like that is incredible. Meghan Wood: Yeah. So it's funny you say that, that is exactly the inspiration for our product. When we started looking at this and thought there's gotta be a better way, we went right to the do it yourself market and all the solar forums and we followed them, we put together our own system and it was hell. Like trying to figure out what size solar panel do you connect to, what battery and how does the inverter work and what are the codes and where would I put it and is it safe and. Where do I set up the panels and ⁓ they look weird just hanging there. And so all of those barriers were very clear that it was not a simple DIY product, but the core pieces existed. And so it was clear to us that someone needed to package that into an appliance and make that a very easy choice so that you could do the DIY version even if you weren't an expert and didn't have the time to figure it out. Aaron Nichols: Thank God for the DIYers, they're really just canaries in the coal mine, aren't they? Meghan Wood: 100 % they're awesome, but you could get deep in those threads for a long time. Aaron Nichols: ⁓ yeah, I'm aware, trust me. So I noticed looking at your website that Puerto Rico is a pretty important testing ground for you guys. Obviously your co-founder is Puerto Rican ⁓ and you guys have, I'm sure, deployed quite a few units down there. Why is Puerto Rico such an important testing ground for this technology? Meghan Wood: Yeah, so as you mentioned, for Nicole, it was really important as a mission to go back there. And for her, the first realization that she really needed to solve this problem was Hurricane Maria when she lost contact with all of her family and just, you know, since then has wanted to create a solution for everyone there. My first time there was this past year. We went for an accelerator called Parallel 18. And when I got to the island, it was pretty immediately clear that it was very different than the rest of the U.S. right now. in the fact that malls have generator stores and your Uber drivers talk to you about solar panels and how many panels they have on their roof and it's really part of daily life because there's such frequent outages that you're worried about your fridge going off and losing thousand dollars of food in there that you just bought for the week. There's this weird thing you don't notice if you don't live in that environment but when I was there for a while you'd go to the grocery store and instead of buying for the next you two weeks you'd buy for the next few days. because you didn't want to prepare stuff and put it in a freezer if you were going to lose it. And we actually just got off a call with one of our pilot customers and she was like, the weight off my shoulders of not having to worry about the food in my fridge being gone when I get home because I wasn't there to solve it or put it somewhere else or do something else about it, now having the riot do that is incredible. So it's so much more of a daily problem and... It's not just the outages, their bills are also quite expensive. Their prices for electricity is like 27 cents a kilowatt hour. I think the average in the US is closer to maybe 15 or 17. So it's much higher than the rest of the US in a place where purchasing power is much lower and ⁓ average incomes are much lower. So there's also an affordability crisis there. At the same time, it's super sunny. It's an island with beaches. And so it's like the perfect place for this type of solution. And we just, that was very apparent that people needed it, people wanted it, and we got so much support from everyone there that that's just kind of catalyzed our first market and our ability to grow there. And just to maybe what I mentioned before on like the fridges, the other main aspect on the bill side is like your air conditioning. you know, it's really hot to sleep there without air conditioning in certain parts of the island throughout most of the year. And so being able to actually run your air conditioner on Raya, and not feeling like you're having this expensive bill all the time for the next however long is really important as well. Aaron Nichols: It's such a cool technology. Yeah, I mean, you guys have obviously done such a good job, but yeah, mean, solar just makes sense and we just continue to put just ridiculous hurdles in front of it for no reason, specifically in the US. Meghan Wood: Thank you. Yes, I remember sitting at Stanford in my, my I did an MS in sustainable energy and just listening to all the next gen things we were coming up with, right? Like really cool things, but that needed to be in the lab for the next 10 years. And I was like, we have solar panels, they exist and they're on, you know, and they're still broadly nowhere. Like we have four or 5 % of us homes have them. ⁓ when there's so much solar potential that could Aaron Nichols: you Meghan Wood: have them, we just need to get out of our own way, as you said. Aaron Nichols: Right. And you were, I mean, I have been a fan of and proponent of Plugin Solar for quite a while, even though you were very clear before we started recording that this is not Plugin Solar, this is something different because you're not islanding, you're not backfeeding, and you're not endangering anyone who's working on the lines during an outage, which is amazing. ⁓ One thing that I'm interested in as well as a Coloradan who has had a couple bikes stolen out of his garage is when I was looking at pictures on the website, you know, have these beautiful pictures of Raya sitting in front of homes, but I thought, you know, someone with a truck could probably just pull up and just take one of these and drive away. What is the solution for that? Is there anything built in that helps prevent that? Meghan Wood: Yeah, it's a great question. So one is the weight. Once the integrated ballast is there and the way the system is connected, that thing weighs hundreds of pounds. So someone would have to know how to take it apart in the way to get that all out to actually move it. And we're also integrating ways to make certain parts of it like untamperable. So you'd have to be able to move the full thing at once, which means you'd have to move hundreds of pounds. So the weight itself kind of makes it Aaron Nichols: Nice. Meghan Wood: non-movable in the current design. At the same time, we've designed it in a way that if you do know how to take it apart, you can move it to your next home, you can set it up yourself and take it down. So that's kind of the creativity there in the product design. then maybe just quickly on the plug-in solar part, we also, so I actually got into this space first looking at plug-in solar and I think it's so cool that you can send electricity back through an outlet. Like I remember when I first looked at this a few years ago, having to convince people who are Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Meghan Wood: you know, really smart on home wires that you could send it backwards because it's like, well, electricity doesn't really flow that way. But yeah, it's just a totally new concept for people. And I ran at that for a while. I plugged my own in, ran my meter backwards, and then kind of came up against all the regulatory barriers that you talked about on your last news podcast. And that's what really shifted us to think outside the box of how could we create something today that's scalable, that doesn't need to wait for regulation to change. What we love about our system is it does provide that automatic backup because it's not backfeeding the grid. So you're connected directly to those appliances. When the grid goes down, now you just don't have a grid input into Riot, but you can keep running the appliances on the solar and battery. So we love that. It's also can become larger in size because we're not backfeeding. So there's no sort of size limitation on that element of it. But The hurdle we still face is smaller balconies. So if you go to large apartment buildings, we still have a hard time serving them with our larger systems. And it would be so awesome for balconies to be able to have a small plug-in system. But we're still kind of watching, as you spoke about in that news article, the different rules around UL and National Electric Code with the requirements for dedicated circuits, like how that's going to move. Because I think it'll be challenging until you really can plug it into any outlet for this to take off. because those hurdles just make it really hard to make a smaller panel make sense. Aaron Nichols: Right. I'm sure you've either been to Europe or just at least heard of just how much plug-in solar is everywhere in Europe. Meghan Wood: Yeah, absolutely. think, I mean, especially Germany, so cool to see how fast they've done that. My understanding of the market there is because they were able to push a certain amount of solar, of current that could go back into any outlet, it kind of opened the flood gates for people to plug into any outlet. So I would imagine if we had something like that in the US, then that's when you can really see it take off. Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and there's, I wasn't aware of how contentious of a battleground this is until actually last Friday when I started, you know, researching and people messaged me about the article I had put out. Like there's 24 states currently considering legalizing Plug-in Solar, but Wyoming actually just struck it down. I was doing a follow-up piece that we're going to release Friday and read that today. Meghan Wood: Yeah, I'm honestly not in the ins and outs of the detail now, but we're following along while we build our product and we'd love to be able to offer a backfeeding product in the future. But at the moment, I mean, what the benefits of our product for places like Puerto Rico are that resilience and that's really core to our product versus something like a plugin model. But it's really neat to watch and... Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Meghan Wood: Very cool to see how many more people are talking about it now than three years ago when I was looking at this and no one had any idea what balcony solar was then. Aaron Nichols: That's kind of how it has to go. I'm learning. You have to feel crazy for a little while and then eventually everyone's like, ⁓ we knew you were right the whole time. Meghan Wood: Yeah. yeah the amount of people who send me stuff, have you seen this thing plug in solar? i'm like yeah, of course! i've been like looking at this forever! Aaron Nichols: Well, ⁓ so from reading that Canary Media article about you guys, I noticed that you've also recently partnered with Grid Alternatives. I don't know how recently, but I'm a Grid alumni myself. They're how I ended up in the solar industry and how I got my first job. So I'm a big fan of them. Can you talk a bit more about that partnership you have going on in Puerto Rico? Meghan Wood: Yeah, I love it. was reading on your LinkedIn as well how you got started in this industry and it's so awesome. I similarly did, I mean similar and different, but I did a rooftop solar volunteer installation in California when I started in this space and it's just really cool to actually see how it all comes together. But on the grid alternative side, they have these awesome programs in Puerto Rico where they've been training local women, men, kind of everyone, but they do have an emphasis on training more women for the solar workforce. And so we've been working with them to try to get more women helping us assemble our systems and install the systems. We're at small scale right now, but the goal would be to work with them to grow out that program so that we can take people that they've trained and then place them in roles and continue to kind of expand that workforce ⁓ on the island. And what's neat about our product is that there are different roles. So it's not all no one's on a roof yet. We're still focused on the ground ballasted systems, although we are planning to get to roofs. but it gives different opportunities for different types of roles for people, which seems like a nice alternative than just kind of the typical rooftop solar installation if that doesn't fit your exact skill set or interest. Aaron Nichols: Yeah, thank God you guys are doing that. Crews with women on them tend to be so much safer, but it's often hard to find and hire women for the trades who want to be outside installing solar all day. Meghan Wood: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Aaron Nichols: ⁓ Well, Megan, I end this show for everyone who comes on with the same closing question. And it has to do with the fact that last year I spoke at my grandma's 80th birthday party. And as I was reflecting on that afterwards, I realized that 80 years means that my grandma was born into a world where what we call renewable energy now didn't even exist. The only way we knew how to make electricity was to go dig things up, move them to a central location, burn them and send the electricity one way. So this is all everything that we're talking about right now and these problems we're trying to solve have all come about in my grandma's lifetime and solar not only being invented but becoming the cheapest power source has happened within my grandma's lifetime. So if you were to just moonshot And don't worry, mean 80 years from now we'll probably both be gone, no one can hold us to this, but what do you think clean energy will look like 80 years from now, or just energy in general? Meghan Wood: One, your grandmother's young. Two, I love that. What a great reflection and a cool thing to just think about for a minute. That's really awesome. What do I think it'll look like? So for me, I went and sat in a class called Understand Energy at Stanford. That was the first real entry I had into the energy world. And I remember being just amazed. Aaron Nichols: Hahaha! Meghan Wood: at the supply chains in effort to get a light bulb to switch on, right? Like no one thinks about that, that we're like digging things where like just the amount of stuff that goes on to get your lights to turn on that no one thinks about to me was crazy. But yeah, to that point, I don't know, I think it would be really cool in 80 years if they laughed at us using oil and gas to power things in our homes. If it was like, what a ridiculous thing. Why would you possibly do that when you could make it on site? Like that would be such a cool thought if everything became, you know, I think everything being decentralized right now is like really hard to think, to imagine because we really rely a lot on the centralized grid and it provides so much benefit to so many people. But 80 years from now, it'd be really cool if it was like, of course my home self-powered and that's like the norm, not a contentious fighting point of why would you possibly want that? But just like, of course that's what happens. ⁓ Yeah, so maybe like Generation Produce where did to the amount it's needed in a way that's on site and doesn't require us digging and shipping and doing all these crazy things. And to me that includes like geothermal and solar and battery and wind and like how do we just yeah use all these cool new technologies to make it make a lot more sense. Aaron Nichols: ⁓ We definitely share the same hope there. For clean energy and also for so many other social causes, there's so many things that we fight about now that I hope have just become so ubiquitous that we don't even think or talk about them. Meghan Wood: Yep, yeah. mean, and I think like what we see in Puerto Rico with anyone talking about solar, regardless of their political views or any other aspiration, like it's just a part, it's a better solution for daily life. That's when it starts to happen. We saw it happen in Pakistan as well with their rent solar revolution from a distributed point of view. And yeah, I think when it just becomes the better solution, it doesn't become a contentious point. Aaron Nichols: Well, Megan, if you do like to be found online or otherwise, where do you want to be found? Meghan Wood: Great question. So our website's ryapower.com. We do have a contact us there and I do my best to answer everyone in timely manner. You can also reach me at info at ryapower.com and also follow my LinkedIn. We share stuff there. Maybe finally our Instagram is kind of fun. We have some videos of our installations. We do some more fun upbeat content. So if you want something outside of the business world, follow our Raya Power Instagram account. Aaron Nichols: I only want things outside of the business world, Megan. I'm so tired of the business world. I'm so tired of corporate messaging. I'm so tired of brands weighing in on things. So I'm very excited to go follow the Instagram. Meghan Wood: Thanks. you Yes, go watch us build things. Watch us sweat in Puerto Rico installing those systems. I like still have back pain from it. Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Well, Megan, thank you so much for coming on and for everyone listening. That's been This Week in Solar. Meghan Wood: Thank you so much.