Everybody in the Pool

E135: The Battery That Pays You Back with Lunar Energy

May 14, 2026·42 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

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 ecosystemHow 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 topHow "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 upLinks: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/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe 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.

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