Your Flat Called. It Wants a Battery - Ashley Grealish, Windfall Energy | Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Description

Half of European households live in flats or rented homes. For a decade, the clean energy transition has passed them by — smart tariffs assume an EV, rooftop solar assumes a roof, home batteries assume a wall you can drill into. Ashley Grealish has spent his career on exactly this structural gap: first at Bboxx, building pay-as-you-go solar for half a million homes in rural East Africa; then at ev.energy, scaling smart EV charging while pushing it beyond premium vehicles; now at Windfall Energy, with a 2.5 kWh plug-in battery that arrives overnight, plugs into a standard socket, and does the rest itself.

What this episode covers

System design over product design. At Bboxx, the team realised that importing a standard television into an off-grid kit didn't work — the power draw was too high. The solution was to rethink everything: low-power 12V appliances, right-sized panels, circular lead-acid battery recovery. The same logic is inside the Windfall battery: don't adapt the user to the system. Redesign the system around the user.

Affordability as architecture. Bboxx started at $400 upfront and couldn't reach most of the people it was built for. The shift to pay-as-you-go unlocked scale. Windfall is at the same first stage — £1,000 on pre-order, with a clear ambition toward zero upfront cost through energy supplier partnerships and, potentially, the UK Warm Homes Discount.

Desirability is not optional. Ashley filled his flat with test batteries from the European market. One arrived at 45 kg on a crate. Others had loud fans and permanent blue indicator lights. None were designed to be lived with. His conclusion: a product no one wants in their home will not reach the people who need it most.

Organisations mentioned: Bboxx · e.quinox (Imperial College) · GemFair · ev.energy · Windfall Energy · Warm Homes Discount (UK)

Marine Cornelis is the founder of Next Energy Consumer, a policy consultancy working on energy poverty, consumer rights, and housing at EU level. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

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Transcription

Speaker #0
Maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean, cheap energy, saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So you should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it. And that'll be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid.
Speaker #1
For decades, the clean energy transition has been promising to reduce bills, cut emissions, and give households more control over their energy. And it has, mostly for households with a roof or a driveway, and a landlord who happens to be themselves. For everyone else, and that's roughly half of the population of Europe living in flats, like me and rented homes. Almost none of this. has landed. Smart tariffs? The next generation assume you own an EV. Rooftop solar assumes you own a roof. Home batteries? Assume they're professional installers and a wall you're allowed to drill into. Ashley Grealish has spent his career thinking about exactly this kind of gap. At BBbox, he helped bring solar energy to half a million homes in rural East Africa using pay-as-you-go models and IoT systems built around people with no upfront capital. At EV Energy, he built smart charging infrastructure and pushed against the assumption that it should only work for premium vehicles. Now, with Windfall Energy, he's asking a simpler and more uncomfortable question. If you live in a flat in London, or Paris, or Rome, or wherever, why can't you have a home battery that just works? The answer is Windfall. It's Windfall is building toward a 2.5 kilowatt hour battery that plugs into a standard socket, arrives overnight, and optimizes itself around the grid. No installation, no up overload, no life-size change required. Small enough to sit in a corner. and designed to be really pretty and be lived with for a decade or more. So this episode is about what it actually takes to build a clean energy product for people who have consistently been designed around rather than designed for, and what that reveals about the architecture of the transition itself. Ashley, welcome to the show.
Speaker #0
Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here. And what a great, that was a great intro. So thank you for that.
Speaker #1
So, Ashley, you have really started with a very different context, right? With the BB Box while still at Imperial. You got involved in some student initiatives. You've been bringing off-grid energy to rural communities in East Africa. And you studied engineering, right? And most engineering students don't really end up there, right? Yeah. What makes you laugh? So what drew you to that problem so early?
Speaker #0
I studied electronic engineering at Imperial. And when I was in school, the first iPhone had just been released. And I got really interested in this technology and decided that I wanted to design the future of mobile phones. So I studied electrical engineering and got an internship at a place called Arm. Arm make the chip. inside of phones and i was there doing a kind of summer internship there when um just before that a friend had come to me and said actually we've got this like technical problem with with some code that we're trying to run on the device we're we're building this thing it was a flatmate of of mine um and she was doing this thing to look at homes that don't have grid access across east Africa, put solar panels in the village and batteries and charged off those solar panels to to bring to them from homes to give them power and they had made their own kind of test device and they were struggling to get the code working so the first thing was just like this oh yeah sure i'll help you out you're a friend um whilst i was working at arm doing the thing that i thought i wanted to to do but i got more and more involved in this project and was looking at clean energy tech solar panels the price of solar panels was falling rapidly the price of batteries this is quite a long time ago but even then the price of batteries was falling rapidly And we were doing, as a student organization, I got more and more involved in this thing that would build central solar panels in the middle of a village on a building, and small batteries that would get charged in the center of them, taken to a house, rented one at a time, one charge at a time, to power lights. So I got really interested in this, became kind of obsessed with this idea, but thought that we could do one step better, which was, what if we don't? put all the solar panels together in the center instead put a solar panel on every house and sell them on a model that is pay as you go so pay monthly for your access to energy rather than all in one go it felt like there was something really interesting there because of that inflection point with solar panel prices things like that so talking with this friend ended up going to rwanda for the first time to help them with their project and then the next year decided that my master's thesis should be based around this. Can we make a Peugeot solar product that works in the area of Rwanda where we were operating? So we made 100 of these small-scale, small home solar panels, batteries, with a kind of little... You text your payment, you get the code back, you type it into the box, and then it would work for a week or a month, depending on how much you paid. And so... This just became, I just love the kind of design, the like seeing the real impact, seeing what this could do to people that were living without grid access, using kerosene lamps typically. We saw the impact that could have, and that became far more interesting to me than designing like the next iteration of a mobile phone.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I totally get it. And that's not very often that I get to meet people who have experience both in developing countries where the need is so for clean energy and for decentralized solution is so urgent. And also at European level, right, at working in European countries. And a few years ago, I worked in Bucanaphaso in Madagascar on demand-side flexibility. in mini-grid access and nano-grid access. And that was also so, you know, kind of enlightening to see how much these solutions could have like such an impact so quickly, right? But at the same time, it really requires to, yeah, a lot of monitoring because it's not like, I mean, in Europe, we are kind of used to our big fat energy systems. that are very much like, you know, seeming ships or something like that. They are like kind of immovable. Well, sometimes there is an iceberg, like one is coming, but usually they are very, very steady and so on. And so, you know, the approach there is completely different. It's something that really needs to kind of start from scratch. So we also need, as someone coming from the outside, We need to to learn from the local experience to see how that will fit and really adapt to the local context. So there were probably things, on my side, there were so many things I had to learn and learn, but I'm sure you also had some. So can you tell us a little bit more about your experience in Kenya and Rwanda for this? Yeah,
Speaker #0
I mean, we learned so many things, of course. I think, kind of touching on what you were first saying there. One thing we learned, so at Equinox as a student, we built a hundred of these pay-as-you-go solar products. And then that morphed into a, I joined a startup called Bbox to build these kind of commercially. And I think one interesting thing that came out of that was pushing to do more than lights and phone charging. Can we fulfill the demand to have radios, TVs, this sort of thing? The obvious solution would be to just kind of go and buy a cheap normal TV, try and sell that alongside a solar panel and a battery. But if you do that, because the TV is kind of AC powered and optimized for low cost rather than high efficiency, it means you need a really big battery and solar panel to power it. So kind of touching on your thing about rethinking systems, we tried to rethink the whole system here and be like, what if we optimize the TV to be really low power? And actually, we took a lot of technology that was used from like caravans and camper vans, 12-volt
Speaker #1
TVs, really low power,
Speaker #0
designed for low power. If you do that, you can really bring down the size of the solar panel and the battery you need and bring down ultimately the overall cost. of the system. So one thing we learned there is like, think through the entire system of what we're building, not just trying to kind of replicate what exists in other markets. So grid is the obvious example, but then even down to the appliances, let's not just use appliances that exist. Let's think of a new kind of energy system here that is optimized to be low power. So I know this is primarily an audio. uh thing but for anyone behind me you can see this is the small battery of bbox with the small solar panel about the size of a laptop but a bit thicker um like this can power tvs radios mobile phones lots of lights like not just really low low energy things so you can do a lot more if you think through the the systems yeah and yeah i mean bbox uh as a company we Designed the products, we manufactured the products, but we also had the distribution networks in all of the countries that we worked in 14 when I left, if I remember correctly, 14 different markets. And again, like thinking through that entire system, being able to build a kind of software platform that powers all of that, that was kind of some of the big advantage we had to do and deliver this cheaply was by... Thinking through that entire end-to-end experience, circularity being a big part of it, these lithium batteries were quite expensive then. And so we used lead-acid batteries in the first generation of this product. And lead-acid batteries can be recycled quite well. And so by having a kind of circular supply chain, we could take back those lead-acid batteries, recycle them, capture most of the value or most of the cost that we spent on. on buying that battery back at the end of life and then kind of redeploy it lots of times. So those are really interesting kind of like circularity lessons that we struggle with in markets like the UK, but was just inherent to making the model work low cost for Bbox.
Speaker #1
That's so interesting. I mean, the fact that you think about the circularity, you really embed the product within a bigger system, right? And I think it's pretty rare that people working in this kind of development and IT are embracing so much this dimension, right? The question of the repurposing of the solar panels, the question of the repurposing or what you do with the battery afterwards always comes back. And it seems to be like, you know, like this never ending conversation. The problem is that these batteries end up in nature and so on. And so what do we do? So, you know, the fact that you had really thought it through and thought about, really, that makes you, like position you somewhere very particular place in the supply chain itself, right? Because you're both your supplier and the developer. And so that makes it really surprising. So you really have something around traceability, right? it's naturally it's not Like the batteries, you were interested in traceability. You also have an experience with gems and diamonds, right?
Speaker #0
Diamond mining. I can explain. The jump is not obvious. But yeah, I got really interested towards the kind of end of my time at e-book, spending a lot of time in Rwanda. I remember it was a particular trip. I was sat with one of the team from Rwanda. And he was telling me about his family and what his family do for a living. And he was talking about small-scale mining. And in electronics, there are these things called tantalum capacitors, a certain type of device. And basically, his family were kind of mining a very small scale, the metals and minerals that go into that. And then we were looking at the future of the clean energy transition with... This was when Teslas very early were just taking off, right? Electric vehicles were going to be a big thing. And there's a lot of metals and minerals that go into batteries, a lot of which for the Tesla NMC batteries particularly, were coming from that border between Rwanda and Congo. So we're spending a lot of time and a lot of focus of our work. We also had operations in DRC as well. And so I got really interested in like, how is this clean energy transition going to change the kind of the metals and minerals that we need to mine? And how do we do that in a fair and traceable way? I started to get interested in that. And then I went for a coffee with a friend about a completely unrelated topic. And he told me that he knew someone that was looking for help to start. traceability mining business. It was a corporate startup, a corporate kind of spin out, and it was called Genfer. And the idea was to sit as part of Anglo-American and Tabeer's group, start by mining diamonds, and then move on to mining gold, cobalt, all the other things that go into electronics. The reason we started with... diamonds specifically is because most of the other things i mentioned yeah smelted at some point in the process mixed together melted down it's that's quite a hard traceability challenge but diamonds are kind of mined in a similar way but they don't get smelted they get kind of cut up and you can prove out traceability much much more easily to start with so i ended up yeah working on a thing called Gemfair. which is super exciting, working on small-scale mine sites in northeastern Sierra, Sierra de O. And we were going to small-scale mine sites, kind of doing training and things around environmental processes and all of this sort of thing. And then kind of auditing that those things were actually happening. if they were, if that mindset was fair and ethical and safe and all of those things, then we would buy those diamonds from the mine site and then skip all of the normal middle layers that happen in the diamond supply chain. So we can capture far more of the kind of value for the miner, give them a much better price, and then sell it direct to on the kind of larger diamond miner without all of those layers in the middle. So that was super exciting. I think it sounded really easy at the start, turned out to be quite hard, but Gemfair still exists, doing great things in the diamond space. I'm not sure yet, but I know when I left, we hadn't quite made it out to the other things I was more interested in, the gold, the cobalt, the other metals and minerals. But I know there is lots of great stuff happening in that space. Anyway, some people from Dbox are actually involved in that. now in a separate startup.
Speaker #1
That's great. And we're getting closer to what Windfall is, but between Windfall and TempFare, you also worked on making a non-premium electric vehicle something really achievable, affordable, like something people could really want. So, I mean, where does this instinct really to work on the corners of the energy transition come from? That's really fascinating. You know, when you were talking, I was thinking, I mean, who is he? Who is this guy? He's a serial entrepreneur. Is he a bit like Indiana Jones looking for a treasure in the middle of the jungle or something? But he has a British accent, so he might be James Bond. So I don't know. Tell me. Where does this come from?
Speaker #0
Honestly, I don't really know. I look back on my career and think like, I don't really, there was never really a plan. Like a lot of these jumps to different areas have been, like I mentioned with one of them, going for a coffee with a friend. Like, I think it's probably, my partner always says I ask a lot of questions. I'm just really curious to learn lots of things. And so I think it's that, just like really wanting to, like, sang it. sat in a car chatting with this guy about mining it just like opened my eyes to to this whole world that i didn't didn't know about and then got perhaps a little bit obsessive um about it but yeah like ev energy is the the one you mentioned uh the next thing the ev charging one similarly again i don't think it was a planned intentional move into the ev space obviously i was interested in electric cars. They were starting to become a thing. Really don't need Tesla and Nissan Leaf at the time. But started to see them, started to drive some occasionally. I thought it was just, it felt like that was going to be an interesting area. And then happened to chat to another friend who happened to be working in that area and joined early on in that journey. But yeah, to tell you what that was, it was thinking that we have two things happening. EVs. Growing in numbers on the road and an energy transition on the grid. So more and more renewables happening. Cars don't have to charge exactly when you plug them in, right? You have some flexibility. You can wait to charge. later in the night or even like in a few days time because you don't normally need to fully charge your your your car every night unless you're driving an extreme amount which most people aren't and renewables are kind of intermittent and so what if we can just make those things work well together change when and how a car charges to suit when renewables are most abundant so i joined a company called ev energy day. I can't remember exactly. It was less than 10 people in the company then to bring some of the experience from Ebox to them. And the idea was let's build a platform that connects all of the cars, all of the charges together into one platform and on the other side of that, connect it to the energy system. So having connected, as you said, nearly a million batteries across Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, we thought we can definitely connect.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it looks easy.
Speaker #0
Cars and chargers across the UK. Again, always turns out not to be quite as simple as we thought. But yeah, that platform grew and grew. And now EV energy is powering a big chunk of the kind of charging programs across the United States. So if you have an EV in, say, New York, and you want to get cheaper charging for your car, you connect it with their smart charge program. And EV Energy optimizes when that car charges to suit the lower cost time. So we connected, yeah, hundreds of thousands of cars into programs there.
Speaker #1
So cool. I mean, so practical. And it really feeds into the vehicle to grid conversation that we had a couple of years ago, I think, now on the podcast. But, I mean, you started working with battery then and you brought them to the home. Thank you. Behind you, we see one of the windfall batteries. Can you show it with your hands, please? Oh, sure. I love that. Yeah, it's here. So it is designed to look good. I haven't seen it in person, but it really, from what I've seen also on your website and so on, it looks really nice. It's 2.5 kilowatt hour. It's plug-in. You've described wanting it to feel like ordering. a printer and delivered overnight, you plug it in, it works. So tell me a little bit more about where this, where the idea comes from. Again, well, now we have an idea where the idea comes from, but really what kind of constraints did you want to play around to make it kind of mainstream?
Speaker #0
Of course. So I guess the backstory is EV Energy, we just talked about, I was there for five years, decided I wanted to do something new. I hadn't decided what yet. Had some ideas, went on a long road trip around Europe, thought about those ideas, decided they weren't great ideas. So put those on pause. But again, going out, speaking with people, I ended up chatting with a guy called Rob, who is now my co-founder. And I was presenting at an event about the work I had done at EV Energy. And more generally talking about how connected devices, internet connected devices can transform the energy system. And he kind of challenged me afterwards. And there was a small group of people around how this is very true. We can connect cars, we can connect heat pumps, batteries, these sorts of things. But actually, in this small group that we were discussing in, it wouldn't work for any of us because we all lived in and around London, either in flats. or rental homes, or smaller terraced homes. And this group was only a small group. But then I started to think about my mum. She has a small terraced home outside of London with not very much roof space at all. I've tried to convince her to get solo before, and it just doesn't work. My sister, she rents a house. I just thought more and more, there is a big missing, kind of ignored... set of the population that can't actually do anything and my intuition was that actually that that set of the population is probably quite determined to do something about climate change um don't have any hard facts on that but it felt felt kind of felt kind of right and so rob and i decided that we should do something about that and did some more research found out as you said that it's over 50 of homes in in the uk Bye. and in Europe. And we didn't have a clear idea of what we wanted to do yet. We didn't know what the solution was. We did a few interesting experiments with energy flexibility. Can we use more energy when it's abundant, when renewable energy is abundant? Tried to control things like dehumidifiers, heated clothes airers, loads of other things, electric wheelchairs and mobility chairs, things like that. And it was really interesting. We learned a lot from that. But really, we found that alone, those things don't have a big impact on builds. And so to have a big impact on bills, you need to affect everything in the home. And some people in our experiment were adding batteries into the experiment and saying, can I store up power in batteries when it's clean and cheap and use it at a later time?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So that was the kind of crux of the idea. And those batteries in that trial, people were using like, I call them camping batteries, these big. designed to be moved around, take camping, charge up your stuff, these big rugged things. And we thought, like, this is fundamentally here a good idea. But we just, it's quite hard to make it work. And we need to make it much easier. We need to make it something people want. We need to make it work in all types of homes. And so myself, Rob, and then our designer, Ben. Spent a long time thinking about what are all the challenges that will stop people getting batteries in their homes. So we ordered a bunch to my house. We drove to Germany to pick up some from the balcony solar kind of side, brought them back. My flat is a bit cleaner now, but at one point it was full of test batteries. And there were so many issues we came across. So one got delivered on a massive lorry truck thing on a crate at the bottom of my flat. It was 45 kilos for a two and a half kilowatt hour battery. And the delivery driver was like, I'm only paid to deliver it downstairs. You've got to work out how to get it upstairs.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
I got it upstairs eventually, but I was sore the next day. I ached.
Speaker #1
Yeah. We need to go to the gym.
Speaker #0
Exactly. And then once they were in the flat, so many of them were really loud, lots of fans. A lot of them had bright blue lights on them. that make this room look a bit wild.
Speaker #1
Yeah, like a disco.
Speaker #0
Yeah, just flashing, oh, it's so bright. And all these things, and we just thought, like, these aren't designed to be what they are. They're not designed to be in people's homes. They're well designed to be in people's homes. Like, I'm really motivated by this idea, but I didn't want these things in my home. And so let's just design something that thinks through the end-to-end. journey makes it easy to deliver to your house makes it something that doesn't wake you up at 2 a.m with a loud fan when it's charging doesn't shine bright lights all over the place and distract people and make it something desirable make it something that people want in their homes now but also in 10 years time because the batteries are going to last a long time we have to last for 10 years as well so yeah we we did a lot of work on the on that kind of design of the object itself. but the whole service around it.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's interesting because in a way, you started with the conversation with iPhones, you know, and one of the things that really made a difference with iPhones was the design and, you know, iPods and iPhones compared to the, I remember the USB keys and USB where you could listen to music with the MP3 and stuff like that. And they were just... They look just ugly. And then came Apple with this kind of shiny new things. And suddenly it becomes something you want in your home. And it also becomes a status symbol, right? So should battery become a status symbol at one point?
Speaker #0
Yeah, why not?
Speaker #1
Why not?
Speaker #0
I think people should be... I think there's a... That's a really interesting question. I think there's a thing that was reported in the UK a little while ago, maybe elsewhere too, about the spread of clean energy products and attributing it to the heat pump dad. So someone gets a heat pump and they get really into it, love looking at the data, these real early adopters, and then they go and tell everyone. about it and then that's how kind of heat pumps have spread but heat pumps have spread i would say fairly slowly because they're very techie and looking at your friends data on a screen probably isn't that interesting but i haven't really thought about this before but maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean cheap energy saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So. You should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it, and that will be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid. But yeah, I haven't really thought about that before.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I know. I mean, I think it's really cool that you... pay so much attention to the look and to the aspect of this thing, right? Because, I mean, if you can afford new appliances and so on, you want them to look good. So if that's the only thing that blocks you from getting a battery in your home, that would be quite a shame. So you kind of fix that gap and that's pretty cool. You even did a limited edition version of the battery, right? I will let listeners check your website to see it, but I think it's a pretty cool thing. And just practically speaking, so 2.5 kilowatt hour, that would make my oven work right in the evening or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
So I'm going to use UK kind of stats here, but I imagine it's similar in Italy. But we've looked at the size for a few different lenses. So A flat typically might use something like five kilowatt hours of energy per day. And so by going at 2.5, we're not ever intending to kind of run the whole house for multiple days as like a backup battery. What it's designed to do is be able to charge in the really cheapest time when wind power, solar power are generating the most excess energy. The cheapest, sometimes even negatively priced energy. So if we can charge it up within two hours, we can really hit that lowest value in the pricing. But more importantly, we can fully discharge that battery to power your home fully during the peak. So during that early evening peak, by having only two and a half kilowatt hours of energy in there, we can discharge that into your oven, your fridge, your lights, whatever it is you're using, and fully discharge it at the peak of that pricing. which gives us this really optimized ROI or savings. And what's interesting is by designing a two and a half kilowatt hours, that ROI works in every house. So if you have a small house, we hit the lowest point and the highest point and maximize the price delta and the arbitrage. If you have a bigger house, we still hit the same delta. It becomes a lower percentage savings of your overall bills, of course, but the ROI is kind of predictable in all homes, which again is something that I think is important to the design. Being able to confidently say this is a sub-five-year payback without needing online calculators to look at all your data and process all of that and understand for your house, actually, it's going to be longer by being small. we can kind of predictably say how much it's going to save, which I think is really important. It also, like keeping it small, allows us to do the plug and play elements. It allows us to keep it under 30 kilos so we can deliver it easily. And so I think we're hitting that perfect sweet spot that makes the kind of, back to the B-Box stuff, the whole system design work really well together as one kind of coherent product. So yeah.
Speaker #1
the the shoe and half will power uh kind of half of your half of your daily usage yeah no that's uh yeah that's that's very interesting also because that's you know that kind of fits also with this idea of sufficiency that we need to i mean we shouldn't design Things that are too big, right? We may not need them. And as our appliances get more energy efficient, maybe that's also something we should actually thrive for. And I presume that it also makes the appliance itself, let's call it an appliance, this bedroom. Maybe tomorrow it's going to be an appliance that you buy kind of anywhere, but that makes it also more affordable. And affordability is one of the things you're going to be working quite a lot. I mean, I know the UK has just passed a new bill to allow balcony solar. That's one of the reasons why we connected in the first place, right? And you told me in the preliminary call that you were in conversation with the UK government about, you know, the warm home discount to maybe to install this kind of small plug-in batteries. So there are many really opportunities to make it work. for really for more and more people. I mean, that I really see like the continuity of the work that you performed in Africa with the really affordability as something central because that's exactly like the solutions they cannot deliver if they only deliver for a happy few.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Right? They have to deliver for the many.
Speaker #0
Yeah, that's really interesting because I, again, haven't really made this connection in my head until this conversation. But at Bebots, the batteries for East Africa, the business started by building batteries, building solar panels and saying, you can buy this. It's $400 and then you get clean energy forever. Well, not forever, but for a long time. And obviously, there are some people that bought those products. but a lot of people couldn't afford $400 upfront. And so that's where we went through that. How do we enable this pay-as-you-go payment plans to make this either no upfront cost or very small upfront cost and then pay monthly beyond that? Where we are with Windfall Energy right now is at that similar first stage. So we just opened for pre-orders last week. People can buy a Windfall battery for £1,000. total £100 as a deposit £900 when we deliver later in the year. And there are some people, there are definitely some people because they've already done it, there are some people that want that and can afford that and are happy to pay the £1,000 and then get their money back over time. But if we want to make this way more accessible to everyone, we have to do something different. We have to make it zero or low upfront cost and still get... instant kind of bill savings from the product. So I think thinking again about systems design, like one way to do this and solve two problems or one is to partner with energy suppliers. So one problem you can solve by doing that is kind of financing that battery on the bill, using the savings to pay off the cost and making it kind of no upfront cost for the customer. And then they still get some savings on their bill. You mentioned a warm homes plan. If we can tap into funding available there, we maybe even can take this a step further by subsidizing a bunch of that cost and giving more of the savings to the customer more quickly, which makes it even better, but it doesn't depend on, like VBOX, doesn't depend on subsidy. But there's a second thing that makes it a good path for us to partner with energy suppliers, Nuts. The one last bit of complexity that annoys me about this product. So if you buy this and you put it in your house, to save money on your energy bills, you need a certain tariff that has peak and off-peak pricing or variable pricing throughout the day. That's how it saves you money. It charges up when it's cheap, powers your home when it's expensive. Most people today don't have a tariff like that. whilst they're widely available. It's a kind of complicated world. It's hard to know which of these tariffs is right for me. It's hard to model or kind of intuit which one is going to best suit your kind of lifestyle, your energy use. And then when you add the battery on, it gets even more complicated. So I would love to solve that last bit of complexity by partnering with an energy supplier and creating a new tariff with them that says... When you sign up for this tariff, we as an energy supplier will send you the battery. That allows us to optimize your home to be really low cost using really low cost energy. And we will pass you a fixed amount of savings per month because you have this battery. in your home. So it becomes a much easier kind of decision here. No complex modeling of different tariffs in your head. You just know this tariff gets a fixed discount on my bill because I have the battery in my home. We're not quite there yet, but that's the vision. I think once we do that, we remove the two last kind of hurdles that I see, upfront cost and tariff complexity. So that's why we're really interested to do that.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I mean, it makes the home almost a dispatchable asset. So that should be at scale. That would be really, really interesting. And I mean, I would also see how interesting it could be for, I don't know, appliance manufacturers and sellers and stuff like that also. Because, I mean, in a way, some could argue that the battery would come in competition to changing your dishwasher, washing machine or something like that. but That would be complementary, right? There would be some complementary pathways. And now I'm thinking, for instance, in Italy, when you purchase your primary residence, you get some tax incentives to change your appliances, basically. Yeah, furniture and appliances. That's, you know, this kind of tax credit for this kind of thing. Yeah, it only benefits rich people. But that's still something to take into consideration. but you know, that would be relevant to have batteries inserted in the models as well. So it's probably one of the first time I have such a conversation about batteries. But I think it won't be the last. And I mean, there are so many kind of views that I see to this technology. When are you planning to display it? Are you going to be in Brussels for the Sustainable Energy Week? Because I have a lot of listeners who will be there. So if you bring one of these... No, we didn't. You didn't in your luggage, like in the Eurostar.
Speaker #0
So we did. We were, I mean, where were we? We were in Amsterdam two weeks ago at the Future of Utilities conference. That was the first time we bought this kind of real version of the product with us kind of outside of the office. Does it have a wheel?
Speaker #1
Does it have a name?
Speaker #0
So there is a big flight case to carry around. And I'll reveal a little secret on the podcast. We took most of the batteries out of this one, so we can more easily carry it. Because 25 kilos is light for a battery. We can deliver it, but it's still quite a lot to carry around on the train.
Speaker #1
Spoiler alert, it's the weight of my child. I wouldn't carry her all day.
Speaker #0
Exactly, exactly. But to your question, Belgium, I know, I mean, we don't have a plan to come do that. But maybe we'll chat after this podcast to see if we... see if we should come to that. We've just been through a kind of a run of launch party events starting in the Netherlands, as I said, but then last week was full of back-to-back events around London where we were taking this, and then I think Rob and I are taking a short break from events for now, and then hopefully, yeah, maybe we'll come to the one you mentioned, maybe others, but I mean, follow us on LinkedIn. We always shout about what event we'll be at.
Speaker #1
Thank you so much, Leslie. I've learned so much about batteries and, you know, this podcast is really about making these kind of encounters and making sure that we get to learn from people with a very different perspective. So thank you. Thank you very much for this very candid conversation. I loved it. So thank you and uh, Best of luck for the next steps and enjoy your break. Thank you.
Speaker #0
It's been really great chatting with you. Thank you.
Speaker #1
Energetic explores the people, policies and institutions shaping Europe's and the world's energy transition. I am Marine Cornelis. If you found this conversation valuable, you can share it with colleagues working on housing, governance and consumer protection. You will find references and further reading in the show notes.

About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

Energ'Ethic is a podcast about those questions. Hosted by Marine Cornelis — founder of Next Energy Consumer and a leading voice on energy poverty, consumer rights, and the social conditions of the energy transition — each episode brings together the people who are closest to where policy meets reality: regulators navigating enforcement gaps, researchers with evidence that hasn't reached the policy room yet, practitioners managing the friction between EU ambition and local capacity.

The conversations are rigorous and grounded. The guests are people with direct institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in getting this right.

Energ'Ethic is listened to by policymakers, legal and regulatory professionals, NGO and civil society leaders, and researchers working at the intersection of energy, housing, consumers, and governance. It is not a generalist show about the energy transition. It is a specialist conversation for people who are already inside the problem.

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About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

The conversations are rigorous and grounded. The guests are people with direct institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in getting this right.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

What this episode covers

Organisations mentioned: Bboxx · e.quinox (Imperial College) · GemFair · ev.energy · Windfall Energy · Warm Homes Discount (UK)

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Music: I Need You Here - Kamarius
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Transcription

Speaker #0
Maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean, cheap energy, saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So you should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it. And that'll be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid.
Speaker #1
For decades, the clean energy transition has been promising to reduce bills, cut emissions, and give households more control over their energy. And it has, mostly for households with a roof or a driveway, and a landlord who happens to be themselves. For everyone else, and that's roughly half of the population of Europe living in flats, like me and rented homes. Almost none of this. has landed. Smart tariffs? The next generation assume you own an EV. Rooftop solar assumes you own a roof. Home batteries? Assume they're professional installers and a wall you're allowed to drill into. Ashley Grealish has spent his career thinking about exactly this kind of gap. At BBbox, he helped bring solar energy to half a million homes in rural East Africa using pay-as-you-go models and IoT systems built around people with no upfront capital. At EV Energy, he built smart charging infrastructure and pushed against the assumption that it should only work for premium vehicles. Now, with Windfall Energy, he's asking a simpler and more uncomfortable question. If you live in a flat in London, or Paris, or Rome, or wherever, why can't you have a home battery that just works? The answer is Windfall. It's Windfall is building toward a 2.5 kilowatt hour battery that plugs into a standard socket, arrives overnight, and optimizes itself around the grid. No installation, no up overload, no life-size change required. Small enough to sit in a corner. and designed to be really pretty and be lived with for a decade or more. So this episode is about what it actually takes to build a clean energy product for people who have consistently been designed around rather than designed for, and what that reveals about the architecture of the transition itself. Ashley, welcome to the show.
Speaker #0
Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here. And what a great, that was a great intro. So thank you for that.
Speaker #1
So, Ashley, you have really started with a very different context, right? With the BB Box while still at Imperial. You got involved in some student initiatives. You've been bringing off-grid energy to rural communities in East Africa. And you studied engineering, right? And most engineering students don't really end up there, right? Yeah. What makes you laugh? So what drew you to that problem so early?
Speaker #0
I studied electronic engineering at Imperial. And when I was in school, the first iPhone had just been released. And I got really interested in this technology and decided that I wanted to design the future of mobile phones. So I studied electrical engineering and got an internship at a place called Arm. Arm make the chip. inside of phones and i was there doing a kind of summer internship there when um just before that a friend had come to me and said actually we've got this like technical problem with with some code that we're trying to run on the device we're we're building this thing it was a flatmate of of mine um and she was doing this thing to look at homes that don't have grid access across east Africa, put solar panels in the village and batteries and charged off those solar panels to to bring to them from homes to give them power and they had made their own kind of test device and they were struggling to get the code working so the first thing was just like this oh yeah sure i'll help you out you're a friend um whilst i was working at arm doing the thing that i thought i wanted to to do but i got more and more involved in this project and was looking at clean energy tech solar panels the price of solar panels was falling rapidly the price of batteries this is quite a long time ago but even then the price of batteries was falling rapidly And we were doing, as a student organization, I got more and more involved in this thing that would build central solar panels in the middle of a village on a building, and small batteries that would get charged in the center of them, taken to a house, rented one at a time, one charge at a time, to power lights. So I got really interested in this, became kind of obsessed with this idea, but thought that we could do one step better, which was, what if we don't? put all the solar panels together in the center instead put a solar panel on every house and sell them on a model that is pay as you go so pay monthly for your access to energy rather than all in one go it felt like there was something really interesting there because of that inflection point with solar panel prices things like that so talking with this friend ended up going to rwanda for the first time to help them with their project and then the next year decided that my master's thesis should be based around this. Can we make a Peugeot solar product that works in the area of Rwanda where we were operating? So we made 100 of these small-scale, small home solar panels, batteries, with a kind of little... You text your payment, you get the code back, you type it into the box, and then it would work for a week or a month, depending on how much you paid. And so... This just became, I just love the kind of design, the like seeing the real impact, seeing what this could do to people that were living without grid access, using kerosene lamps typically. We saw the impact that could have, and that became far more interesting to me than designing like the next iteration of a mobile phone.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I totally get it. And that's not very often that I get to meet people who have experience both in developing countries where the need is so for clean energy and for decentralized solution is so urgent. And also at European level, right, at working in European countries. And a few years ago, I worked in Bucanaphaso in Madagascar on demand-side flexibility. in mini-grid access and nano-grid access. And that was also so, you know, kind of enlightening to see how much these solutions could have like such an impact so quickly, right? But at the same time, it really requires to, yeah, a lot of monitoring because it's not like, I mean, in Europe, we are kind of used to our big fat energy systems. that are very much like, you know, seeming ships or something like that. They are like kind of immovable. Well, sometimes there is an iceberg, like one is coming, but usually they are very, very steady and so on. And so, you know, the approach there is completely different. It's something that really needs to kind of start from scratch. So we also need, as someone coming from the outside, We need to to learn from the local experience to see how that will fit and really adapt to the local context. So there were probably things, on my side, there were so many things I had to learn and learn, but I'm sure you also had some. So can you tell us a little bit more about your experience in Kenya and Rwanda for this? Yeah,
Speaker #0
I mean, we learned so many things, of course. I think, kind of touching on what you were first saying there. One thing we learned, so at Equinox as a student, we built a hundred of these pay-as-you-go solar products. And then that morphed into a, I joined a startup called Bbox to build these kind of commercially. And I think one interesting thing that came out of that was pushing to do more than lights and phone charging. Can we fulfill the demand to have radios, TVs, this sort of thing? The obvious solution would be to just kind of go and buy a cheap normal TV, try and sell that alongside a solar panel and a battery. But if you do that, because the TV is kind of AC powered and optimized for low cost rather than high efficiency, it means you need a really big battery and solar panel to power it. So kind of touching on your thing about rethinking systems, we tried to rethink the whole system here and be like, what if we optimize the TV to be really low power? And actually, we took a lot of technology that was used from like caravans and camper vans, 12-volt
Speaker #1
TVs, really low power,
Speaker #0
designed for low power. If you do that, you can really bring down the size of the solar panel and the battery you need and bring down ultimately the overall cost. of the system. So one thing we learned there is like, think through the entire system of what we're building, not just trying to kind of replicate what exists in other markets. So grid is the obvious example, but then even down to the appliances, let's not just use appliances that exist. Let's think of a new kind of energy system here that is optimized to be low power. So I know this is primarily an audio. uh thing but for anyone behind me you can see this is the small battery of bbox with the small solar panel about the size of a laptop but a bit thicker um like this can power tvs radios mobile phones lots of lights like not just really low low energy things so you can do a lot more if you think through the the systems yeah and yeah i mean bbox uh as a company we Designed the products, we manufactured the products, but we also had the distribution networks in all of the countries that we worked in 14 when I left, if I remember correctly, 14 different markets. And again, like thinking through that entire system, being able to build a kind of software platform that powers all of that, that was kind of some of the big advantage we had to do and deliver this cheaply was by... Thinking through that entire end-to-end experience, circularity being a big part of it, these lithium batteries were quite expensive then. And so we used lead-acid batteries in the first generation of this product. And lead-acid batteries can be recycled quite well. And so by having a kind of circular supply chain, we could take back those lead-acid batteries, recycle them, capture most of the value or most of the cost that we spent on. on buying that battery back at the end of life and then kind of redeploy it lots of times. So those are really interesting kind of like circularity lessons that we struggle with in markets like the UK, but was just inherent to making the model work low cost for Bbox.
Speaker #1
That's so interesting. I mean, the fact that you think about the circularity, you really embed the product within a bigger system, right? And I think it's pretty rare that people working in this kind of development and IT are embracing so much this dimension, right? The question of the repurposing of the solar panels, the question of the repurposing or what you do with the battery afterwards always comes back. And it seems to be like, you know, like this never ending conversation. The problem is that these batteries end up in nature and so on. And so what do we do? So, you know, the fact that you had really thought it through and thought about, really, that makes you, like position you somewhere very particular place in the supply chain itself, right? Because you're both your supplier and the developer. And so that makes it really surprising. So you really have something around traceability, right? it's naturally it's not Like the batteries, you were interested in traceability. You also have an experience with gems and diamonds, right?
Speaker #0
Diamond mining. I can explain. The jump is not obvious. But yeah, I got really interested towards the kind of end of my time at e-book, spending a lot of time in Rwanda. I remember it was a particular trip. I was sat with one of the team from Rwanda. And he was telling me about his family and what his family do for a living. And he was talking about small-scale mining. And in electronics, there are these things called tantalum capacitors, a certain type of device. And basically, his family were kind of mining a very small scale, the metals and minerals that go into that. And then we were looking at the future of the clean energy transition with... This was when Teslas very early were just taking off, right? Electric vehicles were going to be a big thing. And there's a lot of metals and minerals that go into batteries, a lot of which for the Tesla NMC batteries particularly, were coming from that border between Rwanda and Congo. So we're spending a lot of time and a lot of focus of our work. We also had operations in DRC as well. And so I got really interested in like, how is this clean energy transition going to change the kind of the metals and minerals that we need to mine? And how do we do that in a fair and traceable way? I started to get interested in that. And then I went for a coffee with a friend about a completely unrelated topic. And he told me that he knew someone that was looking for help to start. traceability mining business. It was a corporate startup, a corporate kind of spin out, and it was called Genfer. And the idea was to sit as part of Anglo-American and Tabeer's group, start by mining diamonds, and then move on to mining gold, cobalt, all the other things that go into electronics. The reason we started with... diamonds specifically is because most of the other things i mentioned yeah smelted at some point in the process mixed together melted down it's that's quite a hard traceability challenge but diamonds are kind of mined in a similar way but they don't get smelted they get kind of cut up and you can prove out traceability much much more easily to start with so i ended up yeah working on a thing called Gemfair. which is super exciting, working on small-scale mine sites in northeastern Sierra, Sierra de O. And we were going to small-scale mine sites, kind of doing training and things around environmental processes and all of this sort of thing. And then kind of auditing that those things were actually happening. if they were, if that mindset was fair and ethical and safe and all of those things, then we would buy those diamonds from the mine site and then skip all of the normal middle layers that happen in the diamond supply chain. So we can capture far more of the kind of value for the miner, give them a much better price, and then sell it direct to on the kind of larger diamond miner without all of those layers in the middle. So that was super exciting. I think it sounded really easy at the start, turned out to be quite hard, but Gemfair still exists, doing great things in the diamond space. I'm not sure yet, but I know when I left, we hadn't quite made it out to the other things I was more interested in, the gold, the cobalt, the other metals and minerals. But I know there is lots of great stuff happening in that space. Anyway, some people from Dbox are actually involved in that. now in a separate startup.
Speaker #1
That's great. And we're getting closer to what Windfall is, but between Windfall and TempFare, you also worked on making a non-premium electric vehicle something really achievable, affordable, like something people could really want. So, I mean, where does this instinct really to work on the corners of the energy transition come from? That's really fascinating. You know, when you were talking, I was thinking, I mean, who is he? Who is this guy? He's a serial entrepreneur. Is he a bit like Indiana Jones looking for a treasure in the middle of the jungle or something? But he has a British accent, so he might be James Bond. So I don't know. Tell me. Where does this come from?
Speaker #0
Honestly, I don't really know. I look back on my career and think like, I don't really, there was never really a plan. Like a lot of these jumps to different areas have been, like I mentioned with one of them, going for a coffee with a friend. Like, I think it's probably, my partner always says I ask a lot of questions. I'm just really curious to learn lots of things. And so I think it's that, just like really wanting to, like, sang it. sat in a car chatting with this guy about mining it just like opened my eyes to to this whole world that i didn't didn't know about and then got perhaps a little bit obsessive um about it but yeah like ev energy is the the one you mentioned uh the next thing the ev charging one similarly again i don't think it was a planned intentional move into the ev space obviously i was interested in electric cars. They were starting to become a thing. Really don't need Tesla and Nissan Leaf at the time. But started to see them, started to drive some occasionally. I thought it was just, it felt like that was going to be an interesting area. And then happened to chat to another friend who happened to be working in that area and joined early on in that journey. But yeah, to tell you what that was, it was thinking that we have two things happening. EVs. Growing in numbers on the road and an energy transition on the grid. So more and more renewables happening. Cars don't have to charge exactly when you plug them in, right? You have some flexibility. You can wait to charge. later in the night or even like in a few days time because you don't normally need to fully charge your your your car every night unless you're driving an extreme amount which most people aren't and renewables are kind of intermittent and so what if we can just make those things work well together change when and how a car charges to suit when renewables are most abundant so i joined a company called ev energy day. I can't remember exactly. It was less than 10 people in the company then to bring some of the experience from Ebox to them. And the idea was let's build a platform that connects all of the cars, all of the charges together into one platform and on the other side of that, connect it to the energy system. So having connected, as you said, nearly a million batteries across Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, we thought we can definitely connect.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it looks easy.
Speaker #0
Cars and chargers across the UK. Again, always turns out not to be quite as simple as we thought. But yeah, that platform grew and grew. And now EV energy is powering a big chunk of the kind of charging programs across the United States. So if you have an EV in, say, New York, and you want to get cheaper charging for your car, you connect it with their smart charge program. And EV Energy optimizes when that car charges to suit the lower cost time. So we connected, yeah, hundreds of thousands of cars into programs there.
Speaker #1
So cool. I mean, so practical. And it really feeds into the vehicle to grid conversation that we had a couple of years ago, I think, now on the podcast. But, I mean, you started working with battery then and you brought them to the home. Thank you. Behind you, we see one of the windfall batteries. Can you show it with your hands, please? Oh, sure. I love that. Yeah, it's here. So it is designed to look good. I haven't seen it in person, but it really, from what I've seen also on your website and so on, it looks really nice. It's 2.5 kilowatt hour. It's plug-in. You've described wanting it to feel like ordering. a printer and delivered overnight, you plug it in, it works. So tell me a little bit more about where this, where the idea comes from. Again, well, now we have an idea where the idea comes from, but really what kind of constraints did you want to play around to make it kind of mainstream?
Speaker #0
Of course. So I guess the backstory is EV Energy, we just talked about, I was there for five years, decided I wanted to do something new. I hadn't decided what yet. Had some ideas, went on a long road trip around Europe, thought about those ideas, decided they weren't great ideas. So put those on pause. But again, going out, speaking with people, I ended up chatting with a guy called Rob, who is now my co-founder. And I was presenting at an event about the work I had done at EV Energy. And more generally talking about how connected devices, internet connected devices can transform the energy system. And he kind of challenged me afterwards. And there was a small group of people around how this is very true. We can connect cars, we can connect heat pumps, batteries, these sorts of things. But actually, in this small group that we were discussing in, it wouldn't work for any of us because we all lived in and around London, either in flats. or rental homes, or smaller terraced homes. And this group was only a small group. But then I started to think about my mum. She has a small terraced home outside of London with not very much roof space at all. I've tried to convince her to get solo before, and it just doesn't work. My sister, she rents a house. I just thought more and more, there is a big missing, kind of ignored... set of the population that can't actually do anything and my intuition was that actually that that set of the population is probably quite determined to do something about climate change um don't have any hard facts on that but it felt felt kind of felt kind of right and so rob and i decided that we should do something about that and did some more research found out as you said that it's over 50 of homes in in the uk Bye. and in Europe. And we didn't have a clear idea of what we wanted to do yet. We didn't know what the solution was. We did a few interesting experiments with energy flexibility. Can we use more energy when it's abundant, when renewable energy is abundant? Tried to control things like dehumidifiers, heated clothes airers, loads of other things, electric wheelchairs and mobility chairs, things like that. And it was really interesting. We learned a lot from that. But really, we found that alone, those things don't have a big impact on builds. And so to have a big impact on bills, you need to affect everything in the home. And some people in our experiment were adding batteries into the experiment and saying, can I store up power in batteries when it's clean and cheap and use it at a later time?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So that was the kind of crux of the idea. And those batteries in that trial, people were using like, I call them camping batteries, these big. designed to be moved around, take camping, charge up your stuff, these big rugged things. And we thought, like, this is fundamentally here a good idea. But we just, it's quite hard to make it work. And we need to make it much easier. We need to make it something people want. We need to make it work in all types of homes. And so myself, Rob, and then our designer, Ben. Spent a long time thinking about what are all the challenges that will stop people getting batteries in their homes. So we ordered a bunch to my house. We drove to Germany to pick up some from the balcony solar kind of side, brought them back. My flat is a bit cleaner now, but at one point it was full of test batteries. And there were so many issues we came across. So one got delivered on a massive lorry truck thing on a crate at the bottom of my flat. It was 45 kilos for a two and a half kilowatt hour battery. And the delivery driver was like, I'm only paid to deliver it downstairs. You've got to work out how to get it upstairs.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
I got it upstairs eventually, but I was sore the next day. I ached.
Speaker #1
Yeah. We need to go to the gym.
Speaker #0
Exactly. And then once they were in the flat, so many of them were really loud, lots of fans. A lot of them had bright blue lights on them. that make this room look a bit wild.
Speaker #1
Yeah, like a disco.
Speaker #0
Yeah, just flashing, oh, it's so bright. And all these things, and we just thought, like, these aren't designed to be what they are. They're not designed to be in people's homes. They're well designed to be in people's homes. Like, I'm really motivated by this idea, but I didn't want these things in my home. And so let's just design something that thinks through the end-to-end. journey makes it easy to deliver to your house makes it something that doesn't wake you up at 2 a.m with a loud fan when it's charging doesn't shine bright lights all over the place and distract people and make it something desirable make it something that people want in their homes now but also in 10 years time because the batteries are going to last a long time we have to last for 10 years as well so yeah we we did a lot of work on the on that kind of design of the object itself. but the whole service around it.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's interesting because in a way, you started with the conversation with iPhones, you know, and one of the things that really made a difference with iPhones was the design and, you know, iPods and iPhones compared to the, I remember the USB keys and USB where you could listen to music with the MP3 and stuff like that. And they were just... They look just ugly. And then came Apple with this kind of shiny new things. And suddenly it becomes something you want in your home. And it also becomes a status symbol, right? So should battery become a status symbol at one point?
Speaker #0
Yeah, why not?
Speaker #1
Why not?
Speaker #0
I think people should be... I think there's a... That's a really interesting question. I think there's a thing that was reported in the UK a little while ago, maybe elsewhere too, about the spread of clean energy products and attributing it to the heat pump dad. So someone gets a heat pump and they get really into it, love looking at the data, these real early adopters, and then they go and tell everyone. about it and then that's how kind of heat pumps have spread but heat pumps have spread i would say fairly slowly because they're very techie and looking at your friends data on a screen probably isn't that interesting but i haven't really thought about this before but maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean cheap energy saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So. You should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it, and that will be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid. But yeah, I haven't really thought about that before.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I know. I mean, I think it's really cool that you... pay so much attention to the look and to the aspect of this thing, right? Because, I mean, if you can afford new appliances and so on, you want them to look good. So if that's the only thing that blocks you from getting a battery in your home, that would be quite a shame. So you kind of fix that gap and that's pretty cool. You even did a limited edition version of the battery, right? I will let listeners check your website to see it, but I think it's a pretty cool thing. And just practically speaking, so 2.5 kilowatt hour, that would make my oven work right in the evening or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
So I'm going to use UK kind of stats here, but I imagine it's similar in Italy. But we've looked at the size for a few different lenses. So A flat typically might use something like five kilowatt hours of energy per day. And so by going at 2.5, we're not ever intending to kind of run the whole house for multiple days as like a backup battery. What it's designed to do is be able to charge in the really cheapest time when wind power, solar power are generating the most excess energy. The cheapest, sometimes even negatively priced energy. So if we can charge it up within two hours, we can really hit that lowest value in the pricing. But more importantly, we can fully discharge that battery to power your home fully during the peak. So during that early evening peak, by having only two and a half kilowatt hours of energy in there, we can discharge that into your oven, your fridge, your lights, whatever it is you're using, and fully discharge it at the peak of that pricing. which gives us this really optimized ROI or savings. And what's interesting is by designing a two and a half kilowatt hours, that ROI works in every house. So if you have a small house, we hit the lowest point and the highest point and maximize the price delta and the arbitrage. If you have a bigger house, we still hit the same delta. It becomes a lower percentage savings of your overall bills, of course, but the ROI is kind of predictable in all homes, which again is something that I think is important to the design. Being able to confidently say this is a sub-five-year payback without needing online calculators to look at all your data and process all of that and understand for your house, actually, it's going to be longer by being small. we can kind of predictably say how much it's going to save, which I think is really important. It also, like keeping it small, allows us to do the plug and play elements. It allows us to keep it under 30 kilos so we can deliver it easily. And so I think we're hitting that perfect sweet spot that makes the kind of, back to the B-Box stuff, the whole system design work really well together as one kind of coherent product. So yeah.
Speaker #1
the the shoe and half will power uh kind of half of your half of your daily usage yeah no that's uh yeah that's that's very interesting also because that's you know that kind of fits also with this idea of sufficiency that we need to i mean we shouldn't design Things that are too big, right? We may not need them. And as our appliances get more energy efficient, maybe that's also something we should actually thrive for. And I presume that it also makes the appliance itself, let's call it an appliance, this bedroom. Maybe tomorrow it's going to be an appliance that you buy kind of anywhere, but that makes it also more affordable. And affordability is one of the things you're going to be working quite a lot. I mean, I know the UK has just passed a new bill to allow balcony solar. That's one of the reasons why we connected in the first place, right? And you told me in the preliminary call that you were in conversation with the UK government about, you know, the warm home discount to maybe to install this kind of small plug-in batteries. So there are many really opportunities to make it work. for really for more and more people. I mean, that I really see like the continuity of the work that you performed in Africa with the really affordability as something central because that's exactly like the solutions they cannot deliver if they only deliver for a happy few.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Right? They have to deliver for the many.
Speaker #0
Yeah, that's really interesting because I, again, haven't really made this connection in my head until this conversation. But at Bebots, the batteries for East Africa, the business started by building batteries, building solar panels and saying, you can buy this. It's $400 and then you get clean energy forever. Well, not forever, but for a long time. And obviously, there are some people that bought those products. but a lot of people couldn't afford $400 upfront. And so that's where we went through that. How do we enable this pay-as-you-go payment plans to make this either no upfront cost or very small upfront cost and then pay monthly beyond that? Where we are with Windfall Energy right now is at that similar first stage. So we just opened for pre-orders last week. People can buy a Windfall battery for £1,000. total £100 as a deposit £900 when we deliver later in the year. And there are some people, there are definitely some people because they've already done it, there are some people that want that and can afford that and are happy to pay the £1,000 and then get their money back over time. But if we want to make this way more accessible to everyone, we have to do something different. We have to make it zero or low upfront cost and still get... instant kind of bill savings from the product. So I think thinking again about systems design, like one way to do this and solve two problems or one is to partner with energy suppliers. So one problem you can solve by doing that is kind of financing that battery on the bill, using the savings to pay off the cost and making it kind of no upfront cost for the customer. And then they still get some savings on their bill. You mentioned a warm homes plan. If we can tap into funding available there, we maybe even can take this a step further by subsidizing a bunch of that cost and giving more of the savings to the customer more quickly, which makes it even better, but it doesn't depend on, like VBOX, doesn't depend on subsidy. But there's a second thing that makes it a good path for us to partner with energy suppliers, Nuts. The one last bit of complexity that annoys me about this product. So if you buy this and you put it in your house, to save money on your energy bills, you need a certain tariff that has peak and off-peak pricing or variable pricing throughout the day. That's how it saves you money. It charges up when it's cheap, powers your home when it's expensive. Most people today don't have a tariff like that. whilst they're widely available. It's a kind of complicated world. It's hard to know which of these tariffs is right for me. It's hard to model or kind of intuit which one is going to best suit your kind of lifestyle, your energy use. And then when you add the battery on, it gets even more complicated. So I would love to solve that last bit of complexity by partnering with an energy supplier and creating a new tariff with them that says... When you sign up for this tariff, we as an energy supplier will send you the battery. That allows us to optimize your home to be really low cost using really low cost energy. And we will pass you a fixed amount of savings per month because you have this battery. in your home. So it becomes a much easier kind of decision here. No complex modeling of different tariffs in your head. You just know this tariff gets a fixed discount on my bill because I have the battery in my home. We're not quite there yet, but that's the vision. I think once we do that, we remove the two last kind of hurdles that I see, upfront cost and tariff complexity. So that's why we're really interested to do that.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I mean, it makes the home almost a dispatchable asset. So that should be at scale. That would be really, really interesting. And I mean, I would also see how interesting it could be for, I don't know, appliance manufacturers and sellers and stuff like that also. Because, I mean, in a way, some could argue that the battery would come in competition to changing your dishwasher, washing machine or something like that. but That would be complementary, right? There would be some complementary pathways. And now I'm thinking, for instance, in Italy, when you purchase your primary residence, you get some tax incentives to change your appliances, basically. Yeah, furniture and appliances. That's, you know, this kind of tax credit for this kind of thing. Yeah, it only benefits rich people. But that's still something to take into consideration. but you know, that would be relevant to have batteries inserted in the models as well. So it's probably one of the first time I have such a conversation about batteries. But I think it won't be the last. And I mean, there are so many kind of views that I see to this technology. When are you planning to display it? Are you going to be in Brussels for the Sustainable Energy Week? Because I have a lot of listeners who will be there. So if you bring one of these... No, we didn't. You didn't in your luggage, like in the Eurostar.
Speaker #0
So we did. We were, I mean, where were we? We were in Amsterdam two weeks ago at the Future of Utilities conference. That was the first time we bought this kind of real version of the product with us kind of outside of the office. Does it have a wheel?
Speaker #1
Does it have a name?
Speaker #0
So there is a big flight case to carry around. And I'll reveal a little secret on the podcast. We took most of the batteries out of this one, so we can more easily carry it. Because 25 kilos is light for a battery. We can deliver it, but it's still quite a lot to carry around on the train.
Speaker #1
Spoiler alert, it's the weight of my child. I wouldn't carry her all day.
Speaker #0
Exactly, exactly. But to your question, Belgium, I know, I mean, we don't have a plan to come do that. But maybe we'll chat after this podcast to see if we... see if we should come to that. We've just been through a kind of a run of launch party events starting in the Netherlands, as I said, but then last week was full of back-to-back events around London where we were taking this, and then I think Rob and I are taking a short break from events for now, and then hopefully, yeah, maybe we'll come to the one you mentioned, maybe others, but I mean, follow us on LinkedIn. We always shout about what event we'll be at.
Speaker #1
Thank you so much, Leslie. I've learned so much about batteries and, you know, this podcast is really about making these kind of encounters and making sure that we get to learn from people with a very different perspective. So thank you. Thank you very much for this very candid conversation. I loved it. So thank you and uh, Best of luck for the next steps and enjoy your break. Thank you.
Speaker #0
It's been really great chatting with you. Thank you.
Speaker #1
Energetic explores the people, policies and institutions shaping Europe's and the world's energy transition. I am Marine Cornelis. If you found this conversation valuable, you can share it with colleagues working on housing, governance and consumer protection. You will find references and further reading in the show notes.

About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

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About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

The conversations are rigorous and grounded. The guests are people with direct institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in getting this right.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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What this episode covers

Organisations mentioned: Bboxx · e.quinox (Imperial College) · GemFair · ev.energy · Windfall Energy · Warm Homes Discount (UK)

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean, cheap energy, saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So you should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it. And that'll be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid.
Speaker #1
For decades, the clean energy transition has been promising to reduce bills, cut emissions, and give households more control over their energy. And it has, mostly for households with a roof or a driveway, and a landlord who happens to be themselves. For everyone else, and that's roughly half of the population of Europe living in flats, like me and rented homes. Almost none of this. has landed. Smart tariffs? The next generation assume you own an EV. Rooftop solar assumes you own a roof. Home batteries? Assume they're professional installers and a wall you're allowed to drill into. Ashley Grealish has spent his career thinking about exactly this kind of gap. At BBbox, he helped bring solar energy to half a million homes in rural East Africa using pay-as-you-go models and IoT systems built around people with no upfront capital. At EV Energy, he built smart charging infrastructure and pushed against the assumption that it should only work for premium vehicles. Now, with Windfall Energy, he's asking a simpler and more uncomfortable question. If you live in a flat in London, or Paris, or Rome, or wherever, why can't you have a home battery that just works? The answer is Windfall. It's Windfall is building toward a 2.5 kilowatt hour battery that plugs into a standard socket, arrives overnight, and optimizes itself around the grid. No installation, no up overload, no life-size change required. Small enough to sit in a corner. and designed to be really pretty and be lived with for a decade or more. So this episode is about what it actually takes to build a clean energy product for people who have consistently been designed around rather than designed for, and what that reveals about the architecture of the transition itself. Ashley, welcome to the show.
Speaker #0
Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here. And what a great, that was a great intro. So thank you for that.
Speaker #1
So, Ashley, you have really started with a very different context, right? With the BB Box while still at Imperial. You got involved in some student initiatives. You've been bringing off-grid energy to rural communities in East Africa. And you studied engineering, right? And most engineering students don't really end up there, right? Yeah. What makes you laugh? So what drew you to that problem so early?
Speaker #0
I studied electronic engineering at Imperial. And when I was in school, the first iPhone had just been released. And I got really interested in this technology and decided that I wanted to design the future of mobile phones. So I studied electrical engineering and got an internship at a place called Arm. Arm make the chip. inside of phones and i was there doing a kind of summer internship there when um just before that a friend had come to me and said actually we've got this like technical problem with with some code that we're trying to run on the device we're we're building this thing it was a flatmate of of mine um and she was doing this thing to look at homes that don't have grid access across east Africa, put solar panels in the village and batteries and charged off those solar panels to to bring to them from homes to give them power and they had made their own kind of test device and they were struggling to get the code working so the first thing was just like this oh yeah sure i'll help you out you're a friend um whilst i was working at arm doing the thing that i thought i wanted to to do but i got more and more involved in this project and was looking at clean energy tech solar panels the price of solar panels was falling rapidly the price of batteries this is quite a long time ago but even then the price of batteries was falling rapidly And we were doing, as a student organization, I got more and more involved in this thing that would build central solar panels in the middle of a village on a building, and small batteries that would get charged in the center of them, taken to a house, rented one at a time, one charge at a time, to power lights. So I got really interested in this, became kind of obsessed with this idea, but thought that we could do one step better, which was, what if we don't? put all the solar panels together in the center instead put a solar panel on every house and sell them on a model that is pay as you go so pay monthly for your access to energy rather than all in one go it felt like there was something really interesting there because of that inflection point with solar panel prices things like that so talking with this friend ended up going to rwanda for the first time to help them with their project and then the next year decided that my master's thesis should be based around this. Can we make a Peugeot solar product that works in the area of Rwanda where we were operating? So we made 100 of these small-scale, small home solar panels, batteries, with a kind of little... You text your payment, you get the code back, you type it into the box, and then it would work for a week or a month, depending on how much you paid. And so... This just became, I just love the kind of design, the like seeing the real impact, seeing what this could do to people that were living without grid access, using kerosene lamps typically. We saw the impact that could have, and that became far more interesting to me than designing like the next iteration of a mobile phone.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I totally get it. And that's not very often that I get to meet people who have experience both in developing countries where the need is so for clean energy and for decentralized solution is so urgent. And also at European level, right, at working in European countries. And a few years ago, I worked in Bucanaphaso in Madagascar on demand-side flexibility. in mini-grid access and nano-grid access. And that was also so, you know, kind of enlightening to see how much these solutions could have like such an impact so quickly, right? But at the same time, it really requires to, yeah, a lot of monitoring because it's not like, I mean, in Europe, we are kind of used to our big fat energy systems. that are very much like, you know, seeming ships or something like that. They are like kind of immovable. Well, sometimes there is an iceberg, like one is coming, but usually they are very, very steady and so on. And so, you know, the approach there is completely different. It's something that really needs to kind of start from scratch. So we also need, as someone coming from the outside, We need to to learn from the local experience to see how that will fit and really adapt to the local context. So there were probably things, on my side, there were so many things I had to learn and learn, but I'm sure you also had some. So can you tell us a little bit more about your experience in Kenya and Rwanda for this? Yeah,
Speaker #0
I mean, we learned so many things, of course. I think, kind of touching on what you were first saying there. One thing we learned, so at Equinox as a student, we built a hundred of these pay-as-you-go solar products. And then that morphed into a, I joined a startup called Bbox to build these kind of commercially. And I think one interesting thing that came out of that was pushing to do more than lights and phone charging. Can we fulfill the demand to have radios, TVs, this sort of thing? The obvious solution would be to just kind of go and buy a cheap normal TV, try and sell that alongside a solar panel and a battery. But if you do that, because the TV is kind of AC powered and optimized for low cost rather than high efficiency, it means you need a really big battery and solar panel to power it. So kind of touching on your thing about rethinking systems, we tried to rethink the whole system here and be like, what if we optimize the TV to be really low power? And actually, we took a lot of technology that was used from like caravans and camper vans, 12-volt
Speaker #1
TVs, really low power,
Speaker #0
designed for low power. If you do that, you can really bring down the size of the solar panel and the battery you need and bring down ultimately the overall cost. of the system. So one thing we learned there is like, think through the entire system of what we're building, not just trying to kind of replicate what exists in other markets. So grid is the obvious example, but then even down to the appliances, let's not just use appliances that exist. Let's think of a new kind of energy system here that is optimized to be low power. So I know this is primarily an audio. uh thing but for anyone behind me you can see this is the small battery of bbox with the small solar panel about the size of a laptop but a bit thicker um like this can power tvs radios mobile phones lots of lights like not just really low low energy things so you can do a lot more if you think through the the systems yeah and yeah i mean bbox uh as a company we Designed the products, we manufactured the products, but we also had the distribution networks in all of the countries that we worked in 14 when I left, if I remember correctly, 14 different markets. And again, like thinking through that entire system, being able to build a kind of software platform that powers all of that, that was kind of some of the big advantage we had to do and deliver this cheaply was by... Thinking through that entire end-to-end experience, circularity being a big part of it, these lithium batteries were quite expensive then. And so we used lead-acid batteries in the first generation of this product. And lead-acid batteries can be recycled quite well. And so by having a kind of circular supply chain, we could take back those lead-acid batteries, recycle them, capture most of the value or most of the cost that we spent on. on buying that battery back at the end of life and then kind of redeploy it lots of times. So those are really interesting kind of like circularity lessons that we struggle with in markets like the UK, but was just inherent to making the model work low cost for Bbox.
Speaker #1
That's so interesting. I mean, the fact that you think about the circularity, you really embed the product within a bigger system, right? And I think it's pretty rare that people working in this kind of development and IT are embracing so much this dimension, right? The question of the repurposing of the solar panels, the question of the repurposing or what you do with the battery afterwards always comes back. And it seems to be like, you know, like this never ending conversation. The problem is that these batteries end up in nature and so on. And so what do we do? So, you know, the fact that you had really thought it through and thought about, really, that makes you, like position you somewhere very particular place in the supply chain itself, right? Because you're both your supplier and the developer. And so that makes it really surprising. So you really have something around traceability, right? it's naturally it's not Like the batteries, you were interested in traceability. You also have an experience with gems and diamonds, right?
Speaker #0
Diamond mining. I can explain. The jump is not obvious. But yeah, I got really interested towards the kind of end of my time at e-book, spending a lot of time in Rwanda. I remember it was a particular trip. I was sat with one of the team from Rwanda. And he was telling me about his family and what his family do for a living. And he was talking about small-scale mining. And in electronics, there are these things called tantalum capacitors, a certain type of device. And basically, his family were kind of mining a very small scale, the metals and minerals that go into that. And then we were looking at the future of the clean energy transition with... This was when Teslas very early were just taking off, right? Electric vehicles were going to be a big thing. And there's a lot of metals and minerals that go into batteries, a lot of which for the Tesla NMC batteries particularly, were coming from that border between Rwanda and Congo. So we're spending a lot of time and a lot of focus of our work. We also had operations in DRC as well. And so I got really interested in like, how is this clean energy transition going to change the kind of the metals and minerals that we need to mine? And how do we do that in a fair and traceable way? I started to get interested in that. And then I went for a coffee with a friend about a completely unrelated topic. And he told me that he knew someone that was looking for help to start. traceability mining business. It was a corporate startup, a corporate kind of spin out, and it was called Genfer. And the idea was to sit as part of Anglo-American and Tabeer's group, start by mining diamonds, and then move on to mining gold, cobalt, all the other things that go into electronics. The reason we started with... diamonds specifically is because most of the other things i mentioned yeah smelted at some point in the process mixed together melted down it's that's quite a hard traceability challenge but diamonds are kind of mined in a similar way but they don't get smelted they get kind of cut up and you can prove out traceability much much more easily to start with so i ended up yeah working on a thing called Gemfair. which is super exciting, working on small-scale mine sites in northeastern Sierra, Sierra de O. And we were going to small-scale mine sites, kind of doing training and things around environmental processes and all of this sort of thing. And then kind of auditing that those things were actually happening. if they were, if that mindset was fair and ethical and safe and all of those things, then we would buy those diamonds from the mine site and then skip all of the normal middle layers that happen in the diamond supply chain. So we can capture far more of the kind of value for the miner, give them a much better price, and then sell it direct to on the kind of larger diamond miner without all of those layers in the middle. So that was super exciting. I think it sounded really easy at the start, turned out to be quite hard, but Gemfair still exists, doing great things in the diamond space. I'm not sure yet, but I know when I left, we hadn't quite made it out to the other things I was more interested in, the gold, the cobalt, the other metals and minerals. But I know there is lots of great stuff happening in that space. Anyway, some people from Dbox are actually involved in that. now in a separate startup.
Speaker #1
That's great. And we're getting closer to what Windfall is, but between Windfall and TempFare, you also worked on making a non-premium electric vehicle something really achievable, affordable, like something people could really want. So, I mean, where does this instinct really to work on the corners of the energy transition come from? That's really fascinating. You know, when you were talking, I was thinking, I mean, who is he? Who is this guy? He's a serial entrepreneur. Is he a bit like Indiana Jones looking for a treasure in the middle of the jungle or something? But he has a British accent, so he might be James Bond. So I don't know. Tell me. Where does this come from?
Speaker #0
Honestly, I don't really know. I look back on my career and think like, I don't really, there was never really a plan. Like a lot of these jumps to different areas have been, like I mentioned with one of them, going for a coffee with a friend. Like, I think it's probably, my partner always says I ask a lot of questions. I'm just really curious to learn lots of things. And so I think it's that, just like really wanting to, like, sang it. sat in a car chatting with this guy about mining it just like opened my eyes to to this whole world that i didn't didn't know about and then got perhaps a little bit obsessive um about it but yeah like ev energy is the the one you mentioned uh the next thing the ev charging one similarly again i don't think it was a planned intentional move into the ev space obviously i was interested in electric cars. They were starting to become a thing. Really don't need Tesla and Nissan Leaf at the time. But started to see them, started to drive some occasionally. I thought it was just, it felt like that was going to be an interesting area. And then happened to chat to another friend who happened to be working in that area and joined early on in that journey. But yeah, to tell you what that was, it was thinking that we have two things happening. EVs. Growing in numbers on the road and an energy transition on the grid. So more and more renewables happening. Cars don't have to charge exactly when you plug them in, right? You have some flexibility. You can wait to charge. later in the night or even like in a few days time because you don't normally need to fully charge your your your car every night unless you're driving an extreme amount which most people aren't and renewables are kind of intermittent and so what if we can just make those things work well together change when and how a car charges to suit when renewables are most abundant so i joined a company called ev energy day. I can't remember exactly. It was less than 10 people in the company then to bring some of the experience from Ebox to them. And the idea was let's build a platform that connects all of the cars, all of the charges together into one platform and on the other side of that, connect it to the energy system. So having connected, as you said, nearly a million batteries across Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, we thought we can definitely connect.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it looks easy.
Speaker #0
Cars and chargers across the UK. Again, always turns out not to be quite as simple as we thought. But yeah, that platform grew and grew. And now EV energy is powering a big chunk of the kind of charging programs across the United States. So if you have an EV in, say, New York, and you want to get cheaper charging for your car, you connect it with their smart charge program. And EV Energy optimizes when that car charges to suit the lower cost time. So we connected, yeah, hundreds of thousands of cars into programs there.
Speaker #1
So cool. I mean, so practical. And it really feeds into the vehicle to grid conversation that we had a couple of years ago, I think, now on the podcast. But, I mean, you started working with battery then and you brought them to the home. Thank you. Behind you, we see one of the windfall batteries. Can you show it with your hands, please? Oh, sure. I love that. Yeah, it's here. So it is designed to look good. I haven't seen it in person, but it really, from what I've seen also on your website and so on, it looks really nice. It's 2.5 kilowatt hour. It's plug-in. You've described wanting it to feel like ordering. a printer and delivered overnight, you plug it in, it works. So tell me a little bit more about where this, where the idea comes from. Again, well, now we have an idea where the idea comes from, but really what kind of constraints did you want to play around to make it kind of mainstream?
Speaker #0
Of course. So I guess the backstory is EV Energy, we just talked about, I was there for five years, decided I wanted to do something new. I hadn't decided what yet. Had some ideas, went on a long road trip around Europe, thought about those ideas, decided they weren't great ideas. So put those on pause. But again, going out, speaking with people, I ended up chatting with a guy called Rob, who is now my co-founder. And I was presenting at an event about the work I had done at EV Energy. And more generally talking about how connected devices, internet connected devices can transform the energy system. And he kind of challenged me afterwards. And there was a small group of people around how this is very true. We can connect cars, we can connect heat pumps, batteries, these sorts of things. But actually, in this small group that we were discussing in, it wouldn't work for any of us because we all lived in and around London, either in flats. or rental homes, or smaller terraced homes. And this group was only a small group. But then I started to think about my mum. She has a small terraced home outside of London with not very much roof space at all. I've tried to convince her to get solo before, and it just doesn't work. My sister, she rents a house. I just thought more and more, there is a big missing, kind of ignored... set of the population that can't actually do anything and my intuition was that actually that that set of the population is probably quite determined to do something about climate change um don't have any hard facts on that but it felt felt kind of felt kind of right and so rob and i decided that we should do something about that and did some more research found out as you said that it's over 50 of homes in in the uk Bye. and in Europe. And we didn't have a clear idea of what we wanted to do yet. We didn't know what the solution was. We did a few interesting experiments with energy flexibility. Can we use more energy when it's abundant, when renewable energy is abundant? Tried to control things like dehumidifiers, heated clothes airers, loads of other things, electric wheelchairs and mobility chairs, things like that. And it was really interesting. We learned a lot from that. But really, we found that alone, those things don't have a big impact on builds. And so to have a big impact on bills, you need to affect everything in the home. And some people in our experiment were adding batteries into the experiment and saying, can I store up power in batteries when it's clean and cheap and use it at a later time?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So that was the kind of crux of the idea. And those batteries in that trial, people were using like, I call them camping batteries, these big. designed to be moved around, take camping, charge up your stuff, these big rugged things. And we thought, like, this is fundamentally here a good idea. But we just, it's quite hard to make it work. And we need to make it much easier. We need to make it something people want. We need to make it work in all types of homes. And so myself, Rob, and then our designer, Ben. Spent a long time thinking about what are all the challenges that will stop people getting batteries in their homes. So we ordered a bunch to my house. We drove to Germany to pick up some from the balcony solar kind of side, brought them back. My flat is a bit cleaner now, but at one point it was full of test batteries. And there were so many issues we came across. So one got delivered on a massive lorry truck thing on a crate at the bottom of my flat. It was 45 kilos for a two and a half kilowatt hour battery. And the delivery driver was like, I'm only paid to deliver it downstairs. You've got to work out how to get it upstairs.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
I got it upstairs eventually, but I was sore the next day. I ached.
Speaker #1
Yeah. We need to go to the gym.
Speaker #0
Exactly. And then once they were in the flat, so many of them were really loud, lots of fans. A lot of them had bright blue lights on them. that make this room look a bit wild.
Speaker #1
Yeah, like a disco.
Speaker #0
Yeah, just flashing, oh, it's so bright. And all these things, and we just thought, like, these aren't designed to be what they are. They're not designed to be in people's homes. They're well designed to be in people's homes. Like, I'm really motivated by this idea, but I didn't want these things in my home. And so let's just design something that thinks through the end-to-end. journey makes it easy to deliver to your house makes it something that doesn't wake you up at 2 a.m with a loud fan when it's charging doesn't shine bright lights all over the place and distract people and make it something desirable make it something that people want in their homes now but also in 10 years time because the batteries are going to last a long time we have to last for 10 years as well so yeah we we did a lot of work on the on that kind of design of the object itself. but the whole service around it.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's interesting because in a way, you started with the conversation with iPhones, you know, and one of the things that really made a difference with iPhones was the design and, you know, iPods and iPhones compared to the, I remember the USB keys and USB where you could listen to music with the MP3 and stuff like that. And they were just... They look just ugly. And then came Apple with this kind of shiny new things. And suddenly it becomes something you want in your home. And it also becomes a status symbol, right? So should battery become a status symbol at one point?
Speaker #0
Yeah, why not?
Speaker #1
Why not?
Speaker #0
I think people should be... I think there's a... That's a really interesting question. I think there's a thing that was reported in the UK a little while ago, maybe elsewhere too, about the spread of clean energy products and attributing it to the heat pump dad. So someone gets a heat pump and they get really into it, love looking at the data, these real early adopters, and then they go and tell everyone. about it and then that's how kind of heat pumps have spread but heat pumps have spread i would say fairly slowly because they're very techie and looking at your friends data on a screen probably isn't that interesting but i haven't really thought about this before but maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean cheap energy saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So. You should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it, and that will be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid. But yeah, I haven't really thought about that before.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I know. I mean, I think it's really cool that you... pay so much attention to the look and to the aspect of this thing, right? Because, I mean, if you can afford new appliances and so on, you want them to look good. So if that's the only thing that blocks you from getting a battery in your home, that would be quite a shame. So you kind of fix that gap and that's pretty cool. You even did a limited edition version of the battery, right? I will let listeners check your website to see it, but I think it's a pretty cool thing. And just practically speaking, so 2.5 kilowatt hour, that would make my oven work right in the evening or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
So I'm going to use UK kind of stats here, but I imagine it's similar in Italy. But we've looked at the size for a few different lenses. So A flat typically might use something like five kilowatt hours of energy per day. And so by going at 2.5, we're not ever intending to kind of run the whole house for multiple days as like a backup battery. What it's designed to do is be able to charge in the really cheapest time when wind power, solar power are generating the most excess energy. The cheapest, sometimes even negatively priced energy. So if we can charge it up within two hours, we can really hit that lowest value in the pricing. But more importantly, we can fully discharge that battery to power your home fully during the peak. So during that early evening peak, by having only two and a half kilowatt hours of energy in there, we can discharge that into your oven, your fridge, your lights, whatever it is you're using, and fully discharge it at the peak of that pricing. which gives us this really optimized ROI or savings. And what's interesting is by designing a two and a half kilowatt hours, that ROI works in every house. So if you have a small house, we hit the lowest point and the highest point and maximize the price delta and the arbitrage. If you have a bigger house, we still hit the same delta. It becomes a lower percentage savings of your overall bills, of course, but the ROI is kind of predictable in all homes, which again is something that I think is important to the design. Being able to confidently say this is a sub-five-year payback without needing online calculators to look at all your data and process all of that and understand for your house, actually, it's going to be longer by being small. we can kind of predictably say how much it's going to save, which I think is really important. It also, like keeping it small, allows us to do the plug and play elements. It allows us to keep it under 30 kilos so we can deliver it easily. And so I think we're hitting that perfect sweet spot that makes the kind of, back to the B-Box stuff, the whole system design work really well together as one kind of coherent product. So yeah.
Speaker #1
the the shoe and half will power uh kind of half of your half of your daily usage yeah no that's uh yeah that's that's very interesting also because that's you know that kind of fits also with this idea of sufficiency that we need to i mean we shouldn't design Things that are too big, right? We may not need them. And as our appliances get more energy efficient, maybe that's also something we should actually thrive for. And I presume that it also makes the appliance itself, let's call it an appliance, this bedroom. Maybe tomorrow it's going to be an appliance that you buy kind of anywhere, but that makes it also more affordable. And affordability is one of the things you're going to be working quite a lot. I mean, I know the UK has just passed a new bill to allow balcony solar. That's one of the reasons why we connected in the first place, right? And you told me in the preliminary call that you were in conversation with the UK government about, you know, the warm home discount to maybe to install this kind of small plug-in batteries. So there are many really opportunities to make it work. for really for more and more people. I mean, that I really see like the continuity of the work that you performed in Africa with the really affordability as something central because that's exactly like the solutions they cannot deliver if they only deliver for a happy few.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Right? They have to deliver for the many.
Speaker #0
Yeah, that's really interesting because I, again, haven't really made this connection in my head until this conversation. But at Bebots, the batteries for East Africa, the business started by building batteries, building solar panels and saying, you can buy this. It's $400 and then you get clean energy forever. Well, not forever, but for a long time. And obviously, there are some people that bought those products. but a lot of people couldn't afford $400 upfront. And so that's where we went through that. How do we enable this pay-as-you-go payment plans to make this either no upfront cost or very small upfront cost and then pay monthly beyond that? Where we are with Windfall Energy right now is at that similar first stage. So we just opened for pre-orders last week. People can buy a Windfall battery for £1,000. total £100 as a deposit £900 when we deliver later in the year. And there are some people, there are definitely some people because they've already done it, there are some people that want that and can afford that and are happy to pay the £1,000 and then get their money back over time. But if we want to make this way more accessible to everyone, we have to do something different. We have to make it zero or low upfront cost and still get... instant kind of bill savings from the product. So I think thinking again about systems design, like one way to do this and solve two problems or one is to partner with energy suppliers. So one problem you can solve by doing that is kind of financing that battery on the bill, using the savings to pay off the cost and making it kind of no upfront cost for the customer. And then they still get some savings on their bill. You mentioned a warm homes plan. If we can tap into funding available there, we maybe even can take this a step further by subsidizing a bunch of that cost and giving more of the savings to the customer more quickly, which makes it even better, but it doesn't depend on, like VBOX, doesn't depend on subsidy. But there's a second thing that makes it a good path for us to partner with energy suppliers, Nuts. The one last bit of complexity that annoys me about this product. So if you buy this and you put it in your house, to save money on your energy bills, you need a certain tariff that has peak and off-peak pricing or variable pricing throughout the day. That's how it saves you money. It charges up when it's cheap, powers your home when it's expensive. Most people today don't have a tariff like that. whilst they're widely available. It's a kind of complicated world. It's hard to know which of these tariffs is right for me. It's hard to model or kind of intuit which one is going to best suit your kind of lifestyle, your energy use. And then when you add the battery on, it gets even more complicated. So I would love to solve that last bit of complexity by partnering with an energy supplier and creating a new tariff with them that says... When you sign up for this tariff, we as an energy supplier will send you the battery. That allows us to optimize your home to be really low cost using really low cost energy. And we will pass you a fixed amount of savings per month because you have this battery. in your home. So it becomes a much easier kind of decision here. No complex modeling of different tariffs in your head. You just know this tariff gets a fixed discount on my bill because I have the battery in my home. We're not quite there yet, but that's the vision. I think once we do that, we remove the two last kind of hurdles that I see, upfront cost and tariff complexity. So that's why we're really interested to do that.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I mean, it makes the home almost a dispatchable asset. So that should be at scale. That would be really, really interesting. And I mean, I would also see how interesting it could be for, I don't know, appliance manufacturers and sellers and stuff like that also. Because, I mean, in a way, some could argue that the battery would come in competition to changing your dishwasher, washing machine or something like that. but That would be complementary, right? There would be some complementary pathways. And now I'm thinking, for instance, in Italy, when you purchase your primary residence, you get some tax incentives to change your appliances, basically. Yeah, furniture and appliances. That's, you know, this kind of tax credit for this kind of thing. Yeah, it only benefits rich people. But that's still something to take into consideration. but you know, that would be relevant to have batteries inserted in the models as well. So it's probably one of the first time I have such a conversation about batteries. But I think it won't be the last. And I mean, there are so many kind of views that I see to this technology. When are you planning to display it? Are you going to be in Brussels for the Sustainable Energy Week? Because I have a lot of listeners who will be there. So if you bring one of these... No, we didn't. You didn't in your luggage, like in the Eurostar.
Speaker #0
So we did. We were, I mean, where were we? We were in Amsterdam two weeks ago at the Future of Utilities conference. That was the first time we bought this kind of real version of the product with us kind of outside of the office. Does it have a wheel?
Speaker #1
Does it have a name?
Speaker #0
So there is a big flight case to carry around. And I'll reveal a little secret on the podcast. We took most of the batteries out of this one, so we can more easily carry it. Because 25 kilos is light for a battery. We can deliver it, but it's still quite a lot to carry around on the train.
Speaker #1
Spoiler alert, it's the weight of my child. I wouldn't carry her all day.
Speaker #0
Exactly, exactly. But to your question, Belgium, I know, I mean, we don't have a plan to come do that. But maybe we'll chat after this podcast to see if we... see if we should come to that. We've just been through a kind of a run of launch party events starting in the Netherlands, as I said, but then last week was full of back-to-back events around London where we were taking this, and then I think Rob and I are taking a short break from events for now, and then hopefully, yeah, maybe we'll come to the one you mentioned, maybe others, but I mean, follow us on LinkedIn. We always shout about what event we'll be at.
Speaker #1
Thank you so much, Leslie. I've learned so much about batteries and, you know, this podcast is really about making these kind of encounters and making sure that we get to learn from people with a very different perspective. So thank you. Thank you very much for this very candid conversation. I loved it. So thank you and uh, Best of luck for the next steps and enjoy your break. Thank you.
Speaker #0
It's been really great chatting with you. Thank you.
Speaker #1
Energetic explores the people, policies and institutions shaping Europe's and the world's energy transition. I am Marine Cornelis. If you found this conversation valuable, you can share it with colleagues working on housing, governance and consumer protection. You will find references and further reading in the show notes.

About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

The conversations are rigorous and grounded. The guests are people with direct institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in getting this right.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

The conversations are rigorous and grounded. The guests are people with direct institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in getting this right.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

What this episode covers

Organisations mentioned: Bboxx · e.quinox (Imperial College) · GemFair · ev.energy · Windfall Energy · Warm Homes Discount (UK)

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Music: I Need You Here - Kamarius
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Transcription

Speaker #0
Maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean, cheap energy, saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So you should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it. And that'll be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid.
Speaker #1
For decades, the clean energy transition has been promising to reduce bills, cut emissions, and give households more control over their energy. And it has, mostly for households with a roof or a driveway, and a landlord who happens to be themselves. For everyone else, and that's roughly half of the population of Europe living in flats, like me and rented homes. Almost none of this. has landed. Smart tariffs? The next generation assume you own an EV. Rooftop solar assumes you own a roof. Home batteries? Assume they're professional installers and a wall you're allowed to drill into. Ashley Grealish has spent his career thinking about exactly this kind of gap. At BBbox, he helped bring solar energy to half a million homes in rural East Africa using pay-as-you-go models and IoT systems built around people with no upfront capital. At EV Energy, he built smart charging infrastructure and pushed against the assumption that it should only work for premium vehicles. Now, with Windfall Energy, he's asking a simpler and more uncomfortable question. If you live in a flat in London, or Paris, or Rome, or wherever, why can't you have a home battery that just works? The answer is Windfall. It's Windfall is building toward a 2.5 kilowatt hour battery that plugs into a standard socket, arrives overnight, and optimizes itself around the grid. No installation, no up overload, no life-size change required. Small enough to sit in a corner. and designed to be really pretty and be lived with for a decade or more. So this episode is about what it actually takes to build a clean energy product for people who have consistently been designed around rather than designed for, and what that reveals about the architecture of the transition itself. Ashley, welcome to the show.
Speaker #0
Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here. And what a great, that was a great intro. So thank you for that.
Speaker #1
So, Ashley, you have really started with a very different context, right? With the BB Box while still at Imperial. You got involved in some student initiatives. You've been bringing off-grid energy to rural communities in East Africa. And you studied engineering, right? And most engineering students don't really end up there, right? Yeah. What makes you laugh? So what drew you to that problem so early?
Speaker #0
I studied electronic engineering at Imperial. And when I was in school, the first iPhone had just been released. And I got really interested in this technology and decided that I wanted to design the future of mobile phones. So I studied electrical engineering and got an internship at a place called Arm. Arm make the chip. inside of phones and i was there doing a kind of summer internship there when um just before that a friend had come to me and said actually we've got this like technical problem with with some code that we're trying to run on the device we're we're building this thing it was a flatmate of of mine um and she was doing this thing to look at homes that don't have grid access across east Africa, put solar panels in the village and batteries and charged off those solar panels to to bring to them from homes to give them power and they had made their own kind of test device and they were struggling to get the code working so the first thing was just like this oh yeah sure i'll help you out you're a friend um whilst i was working at arm doing the thing that i thought i wanted to to do but i got more and more involved in this project and was looking at clean energy tech solar panels the price of solar panels was falling rapidly the price of batteries this is quite a long time ago but even then the price of batteries was falling rapidly And we were doing, as a student organization, I got more and more involved in this thing that would build central solar panels in the middle of a village on a building, and small batteries that would get charged in the center of them, taken to a house, rented one at a time, one charge at a time, to power lights. So I got really interested in this, became kind of obsessed with this idea, but thought that we could do one step better, which was, what if we don't? put all the solar panels together in the center instead put a solar panel on every house and sell them on a model that is pay as you go so pay monthly for your access to energy rather than all in one go it felt like there was something really interesting there because of that inflection point with solar panel prices things like that so talking with this friend ended up going to rwanda for the first time to help them with their project and then the next year decided that my master's thesis should be based around this. Can we make a Peugeot solar product that works in the area of Rwanda where we were operating? So we made 100 of these small-scale, small home solar panels, batteries, with a kind of little... You text your payment, you get the code back, you type it into the box, and then it would work for a week or a month, depending on how much you paid. And so... This just became, I just love the kind of design, the like seeing the real impact, seeing what this could do to people that were living without grid access, using kerosene lamps typically. We saw the impact that could have, and that became far more interesting to me than designing like the next iteration of a mobile phone.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I totally get it. And that's not very often that I get to meet people who have experience both in developing countries where the need is so for clean energy and for decentralized solution is so urgent. And also at European level, right, at working in European countries. And a few years ago, I worked in Bucanaphaso in Madagascar on demand-side flexibility. in mini-grid access and nano-grid access. And that was also so, you know, kind of enlightening to see how much these solutions could have like such an impact so quickly, right? But at the same time, it really requires to, yeah, a lot of monitoring because it's not like, I mean, in Europe, we are kind of used to our big fat energy systems. that are very much like, you know, seeming ships or something like that. They are like kind of immovable. Well, sometimes there is an iceberg, like one is coming, but usually they are very, very steady and so on. And so, you know, the approach there is completely different. It's something that really needs to kind of start from scratch. So we also need, as someone coming from the outside, We need to to learn from the local experience to see how that will fit and really adapt to the local context. So there were probably things, on my side, there were so many things I had to learn and learn, but I'm sure you also had some. So can you tell us a little bit more about your experience in Kenya and Rwanda for this? Yeah,
Speaker #0
I mean, we learned so many things, of course. I think, kind of touching on what you were first saying there. One thing we learned, so at Equinox as a student, we built a hundred of these pay-as-you-go solar products. And then that morphed into a, I joined a startup called Bbox to build these kind of commercially. And I think one interesting thing that came out of that was pushing to do more than lights and phone charging. Can we fulfill the demand to have radios, TVs, this sort of thing? The obvious solution would be to just kind of go and buy a cheap normal TV, try and sell that alongside a solar panel and a battery. But if you do that, because the TV is kind of AC powered and optimized for low cost rather than high efficiency, it means you need a really big battery and solar panel to power it. So kind of touching on your thing about rethinking systems, we tried to rethink the whole system here and be like, what if we optimize the TV to be really low power? And actually, we took a lot of technology that was used from like caravans and camper vans, 12-volt
Speaker #1
TVs, really low power,
Speaker #0
designed for low power. If you do that, you can really bring down the size of the solar panel and the battery you need and bring down ultimately the overall cost. of the system. So one thing we learned there is like, think through the entire system of what we're building, not just trying to kind of replicate what exists in other markets. So grid is the obvious example, but then even down to the appliances, let's not just use appliances that exist. Let's think of a new kind of energy system here that is optimized to be low power. So I know this is primarily an audio. uh thing but for anyone behind me you can see this is the small battery of bbox with the small solar panel about the size of a laptop but a bit thicker um like this can power tvs radios mobile phones lots of lights like not just really low low energy things so you can do a lot more if you think through the the systems yeah and yeah i mean bbox uh as a company we Designed the products, we manufactured the products, but we also had the distribution networks in all of the countries that we worked in 14 when I left, if I remember correctly, 14 different markets. And again, like thinking through that entire system, being able to build a kind of software platform that powers all of that, that was kind of some of the big advantage we had to do and deliver this cheaply was by... Thinking through that entire end-to-end experience, circularity being a big part of it, these lithium batteries were quite expensive then. And so we used lead-acid batteries in the first generation of this product. And lead-acid batteries can be recycled quite well. And so by having a kind of circular supply chain, we could take back those lead-acid batteries, recycle them, capture most of the value or most of the cost that we spent on. on buying that battery back at the end of life and then kind of redeploy it lots of times. So those are really interesting kind of like circularity lessons that we struggle with in markets like the UK, but was just inherent to making the model work low cost for Bbox.
Speaker #1
That's so interesting. I mean, the fact that you think about the circularity, you really embed the product within a bigger system, right? And I think it's pretty rare that people working in this kind of development and IT are embracing so much this dimension, right? The question of the repurposing of the solar panels, the question of the repurposing or what you do with the battery afterwards always comes back. And it seems to be like, you know, like this never ending conversation. The problem is that these batteries end up in nature and so on. And so what do we do? So, you know, the fact that you had really thought it through and thought about, really, that makes you, like position you somewhere very particular place in the supply chain itself, right? Because you're both your supplier and the developer. And so that makes it really surprising. So you really have something around traceability, right? it's naturally it's not Like the batteries, you were interested in traceability. You also have an experience with gems and diamonds, right?
Speaker #0
Diamond mining. I can explain. The jump is not obvious. But yeah, I got really interested towards the kind of end of my time at e-book, spending a lot of time in Rwanda. I remember it was a particular trip. I was sat with one of the team from Rwanda. And he was telling me about his family and what his family do for a living. And he was talking about small-scale mining. And in electronics, there are these things called tantalum capacitors, a certain type of device. And basically, his family were kind of mining a very small scale, the metals and minerals that go into that. And then we were looking at the future of the clean energy transition with... This was when Teslas very early were just taking off, right? Electric vehicles were going to be a big thing. And there's a lot of metals and minerals that go into batteries, a lot of which for the Tesla NMC batteries particularly, were coming from that border between Rwanda and Congo. So we're spending a lot of time and a lot of focus of our work. We also had operations in DRC as well. And so I got really interested in like, how is this clean energy transition going to change the kind of the metals and minerals that we need to mine? And how do we do that in a fair and traceable way? I started to get interested in that. And then I went for a coffee with a friend about a completely unrelated topic. And he told me that he knew someone that was looking for help to start. traceability mining business. It was a corporate startup, a corporate kind of spin out, and it was called Genfer. And the idea was to sit as part of Anglo-American and Tabeer's group, start by mining diamonds, and then move on to mining gold, cobalt, all the other things that go into electronics. The reason we started with... diamonds specifically is because most of the other things i mentioned yeah smelted at some point in the process mixed together melted down it's that's quite a hard traceability challenge but diamonds are kind of mined in a similar way but they don't get smelted they get kind of cut up and you can prove out traceability much much more easily to start with so i ended up yeah working on a thing called Gemfair. which is super exciting, working on small-scale mine sites in northeastern Sierra, Sierra de O. And we were going to small-scale mine sites, kind of doing training and things around environmental processes and all of this sort of thing. And then kind of auditing that those things were actually happening. if they were, if that mindset was fair and ethical and safe and all of those things, then we would buy those diamonds from the mine site and then skip all of the normal middle layers that happen in the diamond supply chain. So we can capture far more of the kind of value for the miner, give them a much better price, and then sell it direct to on the kind of larger diamond miner without all of those layers in the middle. So that was super exciting. I think it sounded really easy at the start, turned out to be quite hard, but Gemfair still exists, doing great things in the diamond space. I'm not sure yet, but I know when I left, we hadn't quite made it out to the other things I was more interested in, the gold, the cobalt, the other metals and minerals. But I know there is lots of great stuff happening in that space. Anyway, some people from Dbox are actually involved in that. now in a separate startup.
Speaker #1
That's great. And we're getting closer to what Windfall is, but between Windfall and TempFare, you also worked on making a non-premium electric vehicle something really achievable, affordable, like something people could really want. So, I mean, where does this instinct really to work on the corners of the energy transition come from? That's really fascinating. You know, when you were talking, I was thinking, I mean, who is he? Who is this guy? He's a serial entrepreneur. Is he a bit like Indiana Jones looking for a treasure in the middle of the jungle or something? But he has a British accent, so he might be James Bond. So I don't know. Tell me. Where does this come from?
Speaker #0
Honestly, I don't really know. I look back on my career and think like, I don't really, there was never really a plan. Like a lot of these jumps to different areas have been, like I mentioned with one of them, going for a coffee with a friend. Like, I think it's probably, my partner always says I ask a lot of questions. I'm just really curious to learn lots of things. And so I think it's that, just like really wanting to, like, sang it. sat in a car chatting with this guy about mining it just like opened my eyes to to this whole world that i didn't didn't know about and then got perhaps a little bit obsessive um about it but yeah like ev energy is the the one you mentioned uh the next thing the ev charging one similarly again i don't think it was a planned intentional move into the ev space obviously i was interested in electric cars. They were starting to become a thing. Really don't need Tesla and Nissan Leaf at the time. But started to see them, started to drive some occasionally. I thought it was just, it felt like that was going to be an interesting area. And then happened to chat to another friend who happened to be working in that area and joined early on in that journey. But yeah, to tell you what that was, it was thinking that we have two things happening. EVs. Growing in numbers on the road and an energy transition on the grid. So more and more renewables happening. Cars don't have to charge exactly when you plug them in, right? You have some flexibility. You can wait to charge. later in the night or even like in a few days time because you don't normally need to fully charge your your your car every night unless you're driving an extreme amount which most people aren't and renewables are kind of intermittent and so what if we can just make those things work well together change when and how a car charges to suit when renewables are most abundant so i joined a company called ev energy day. I can't remember exactly. It was less than 10 people in the company then to bring some of the experience from Ebox to them. And the idea was let's build a platform that connects all of the cars, all of the charges together into one platform and on the other side of that, connect it to the energy system. So having connected, as you said, nearly a million batteries across Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, we thought we can definitely connect.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it looks easy.
Speaker #0
Cars and chargers across the UK. Again, always turns out not to be quite as simple as we thought. But yeah, that platform grew and grew. And now EV energy is powering a big chunk of the kind of charging programs across the United States. So if you have an EV in, say, New York, and you want to get cheaper charging for your car, you connect it with their smart charge program. And EV Energy optimizes when that car charges to suit the lower cost time. So we connected, yeah, hundreds of thousands of cars into programs there.
Speaker #1
So cool. I mean, so practical. And it really feeds into the vehicle to grid conversation that we had a couple of years ago, I think, now on the podcast. But, I mean, you started working with battery then and you brought them to the home. Thank you. Behind you, we see one of the windfall batteries. Can you show it with your hands, please? Oh, sure. I love that. Yeah, it's here. So it is designed to look good. I haven't seen it in person, but it really, from what I've seen also on your website and so on, it looks really nice. It's 2.5 kilowatt hour. It's plug-in. You've described wanting it to feel like ordering. a printer and delivered overnight, you plug it in, it works. So tell me a little bit more about where this, where the idea comes from. Again, well, now we have an idea where the idea comes from, but really what kind of constraints did you want to play around to make it kind of mainstream?
Speaker #0
Of course. So I guess the backstory is EV Energy, we just talked about, I was there for five years, decided I wanted to do something new. I hadn't decided what yet. Had some ideas, went on a long road trip around Europe, thought about those ideas, decided they weren't great ideas. So put those on pause. But again, going out, speaking with people, I ended up chatting with a guy called Rob, who is now my co-founder. And I was presenting at an event about the work I had done at EV Energy. And more generally talking about how connected devices, internet connected devices can transform the energy system. And he kind of challenged me afterwards. And there was a small group of people around how this is very true. We can connect cars, we can connect heat pumps, batteries, these sorts of things. But actually, in this small group that we were discussing in, it wouldn't work for any of us because we all lived in and around London, either in flats. or rental homes, or smaller terraced homes. And this group was only a small group. But then I started to think about my mum. She has a small terraced home outside of London with not very much roof space at all. I've tried to convince her to get solo before, and it just doesn't work. My sister, she rents a house. I just thought more and more, there is a big missing, kind of ignored... set of the population that can't actually do anything and my intuition was that actually that that set of the population is probably quite determined to do something about climate change um don't have any hard facts on that but it felt felt kind of felt kind of right and so rob and i decided that we should do something about that and did some more research found out as you said that it's over 50 of homes in in the uk Bye. and in Europe. And we didn't have a clear idea of what we wanted to do yet. We didn't know what the solution was. We did a few interesting experiments with energy flexibility. Can we use more energy when it's abundant, when renewable energy is abundant? Tried to control things like dehumidifiers, heated clothes airers, loads of other things, electric wheelchairs and mobility chairs, things like that. And it was really interesting. We learned a lot from that. But really, we found that alone, those things don't have a big impact on builds. And so to have a big impact on bills, you need to affect everything in the home. And some people in our experiment were adding batteries into the experiment and saying, can I store up power in batteries when it's clean and cheap and use it at a later time?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So that was the kind of crux of the idea. And those batteries in that trial, people were using like, I call them camping batteries, these big. designed to be moved around, take camping, charge up your stuff, these big rugged things. And we thought, like, this is fundamentally here a good idea. But we just, it's quite hard to make it work. And we need to make it much easier. We need to make it something people want. We need to make it work in all types of homes. And so myself, Rob, and then our designer, Ben. Spent a long time thinking about what are all the challenges that will stop people getting batteries in their homes. So we ordered a bunch to my house. We drove to Germany to pick up some from the balcony solar kind of side, brought them back. My flat is a bit cleaner now, but at one point it was full of test batteries. And there were so many issues we came across. So one got delivered on a massive lorry truck thing on a crate at the bottom of my flat. It was 45 kilos for a two and a half kilowatt hour battery. And the delivery driver was like, I'm only paid to deliver it downstairs. You've got to work out how to get it upstairs.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
I got it upstairs eventually, but I was sore the next day. I ached.
Speaker #1
Yeah. We need to go to the gym.
Speaker #0
Exactly. And then once they were in the flat, so many of them were really loud, lots of fans. A lot of them had bright blue lights on them. that make this room look a bit wild.
Speaker #1
Yeah, like a disco.
Speaker #0
Yeah, just flashing, oh, it's so bright. And all these things, and we just thought, like, these aren't designed to be what they are. They're not designed to be in people's homes. They're well designed to be in people's homes. Like, I'm really motivated by this idea, but I didn't want these things in my home. And so let's just design something that thinks through the end-to-end. journey makes it easy to deliver to your house makes it something that doesn't wake you up at 2 a.m with a loud fan when it's charging doesn't shine bright lights all over the place and distract people and make it something desirable make it something that people want in their homes now but also in 10 years time because the batteries are going to last a long time we have to last for 10 years as well so yeah we we did a lot of work on the on that kind of design of the object itself. but the whole service around it.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's interesting because in a way, you started with the conversation with iPhones, you know, and one of the things that really made a difference with iPhones was the design and, you know, iPods and iPhones compared to the, I remember the USB keys and USB where you could listen to music with the MP3 and stuff like that. And they were just... They look just ugly. And then came Apple with this kind of shiny new things. And suddenly it becomes something you want in your home. And it also becomes a status symbol, right? So should battery become a status symbol at one point?
Speaker #0
Yeah, why not?
Speaker #1
Why not?
Speaker #0
I think people should be... I think there's a... That's a really interesting question. I think there's a thing that was reported in the UK a little while ago, maybe elsewhere too, about the spread of clean energy products and attributing it to the heat pump dad. So someone gets a heat pump and they get really into it, love looking at the data, these real early adopters, and then they go and tell everyone. about it and then that's how kind of heat pumps have spread but heat pumps have spread i would say fairly slowly because they're very techie and looking at your friends data on a screen probably isn't that interesting but i haven't really thought about this before but maybe our version of it is like people should be proud that they're using more clean cheap energy saving money on their energy bills, but also proud of the thing that's in their home. So. You should only put things in your home that you love, objects that you find valuable and interesting. And so, yeah, I kind of hope that people will kind of show these off and tell people about it, and that will be a large part of how we get more batteries out there and more renewables on the grid. But yeah, I haven't really thought about that before.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I know. I mean, I think it's really cool that you... pay so much attention to the look and to the aspect of this thing, right? Because, I mean, if you can afford new appliances and so on, you want them to look good. So if that's the only thing that blocks you from getting a battery in your home, that would be quite a shame. So you kind of fix that gap and that's pretty cool. You even did a limited edition version of the battery, right? I will let listeners check your website to see it, but I think it's a pretty cool thing. And just practically speaking, so 2.5 kilowatt hour, that would make my oven work right in the evening or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
So I'm going to use UK kind of stats here, but I imagine it's similar in Italy. But we've looked at the size for a few different lenses. So A flat typically might use something like five kilowatt hours of energy per day. And so by going at 2.5, we're not ever intending to kind of run the whole house for multiple days as like a backup battery. What it's designed to do is be able to charge in the really cheapest time when wind power, solar power are generating the most excess energy. The cheapest, sometimes even negatively priced energy. So if we can charge it up within two hours, we can really hit that lowest value in the pricing. But more importantly, we can fully discharge that battery to power your home fully during the peak. So during that early evening peak, by having only two and a half kilowatt hours of energy in there, we can discharge that into your oven, your fridge, your lights, whatever it is you're using, and fully discharge it at the peak of that pricing. which gives us this really optimized ROI or savings. And what's interesting is by designing a two and a half kilowatt hours, that ROI works in every house. So if you have a small house, we hit the lowest point and the highest point and maximize the price delta and the arbitrage. If you have a bigger house, we still hit the same delta. It becomes a lower percentage savings of your overall bills, of course, but the ROI is kind of predictable in all homes, which again is something that I think is important to the design. Being able to confidently say this is a sub-five-year payback without needing online calculators to look at all your data and process all of that and understand for your house, actually, it's going to be longer by being small. we can kind of predictably say how much it's going to save, which I think is really important. It also, like keeping it small, allows us to do the plug and play elements. It allows us to keep it under 30 kilos so we can deliver it easily. And so I think we're hitting that perfect sweet spot that makes the kind of, back to the B-Box stuff, the whole system design work really well together as one kind of coherent product. So yeah.
Speaker #1
the the shoe and half will power uh kind of half of your half of your daily usage yeah no that's uh yeah that's that's very interesting also because that's you know that kind of fits also with this idea of sufficiency that we need to i mean we shouldn't design Things that are too big, right? We may not need them. And as our appliances get more energy efficient, maybe that's also something we should actually thrive for. And I presume that it also makes the appliance itself, let's call it an appliance, this bedroom. Maybe tomorrow it's going to be an appliance that you buy kind of anywhere, but that makes it also more affordable. And affordability is one of the things you're going to be working quite a lot. I mean, I know the UK has just passed a new bill to allow balcony solar. That's one of the reasons why we connected in the first place, right? And you told me in the preliminary call that you were in conversation with the UK government about, you know, the warm home discount to maybe to install this kind of small plug-in batteries. So there are many really opportunities to make it work. for really for more and more people. I mean, that I really see like the continuity of the work that you performed in Africa with the really affordability as something central because that's exactly like the solutions they cannot deliver if they only deliver for a happy few.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Right? They have to deliver for the many.
Speaker #0
Yeah, that's really interesting because I, again, haven't really made this connection in my head until this conversation. But at Bebots, the batteries for East Africa, the business started by building batteries, building solar panels and saying, you can buy this. It's $400 and then you get clean energy forever. Well, not forever, but for a long time. And obviously, there are some people that bought those products. but a lot of people couldn't afford $400 upfront. And so that's where we went through that. How do we enable this pay-as-you-go payment plans to make this either no upfront cost or very small upfront cost and then pay monthly beyond that? Where we are with Windfall Energy right now is at that similar first stage. So we just opened for pre-orders last week. People can buy a Windfall battery for £1,000. total £100 as a deposit £900 when we deliver later in the year. And there are some people, there are definitely some people because they've already done it, there are some people that want that and can afford that and are happy to pay the £1,000 and then get their money back over time. But if we want to make this way more accessible to everyone, we have to do something different. We have to make it zero or low upfront cost and still get... instant kind of bill savings from the product. So I think thinking again about systems design, like one way to do this and solve two problems or one is to partner with energy suppliers. So one problem you can solve by doing that is kind of financing that battery on the bill, using the savings to pay off the cost and making it kind of no upfront cost for the customer. And then they still get some savings on their bill. You mentioned a warm homes plan. If we can tap into funding available there, we maybe even can take this a step further by subsidizing a bunch of that cost and giving more of the savings to the customer more quickly, which makes it even better, but it doesn't depend on, like VBOX, doesn't depend on subsidy. But there's a second thing that makes it a good path for us to partner with energy suppliers, Nuts. The one last bit of complexity that annoys me about this product. So if you buy this and you put it in your house, to save money on your energy bills, you need a certain tariff that has peak and off-peak pricing or variable pricing throughout the day. That's how it saves you money. It charges up when it's cheap, powers your home when it's expensive. Most people today don't have a tariff like that. whilst they're widely available. It's a kind of complicated world. It's hard to know which of these tariffs is right for me. It's hard to model or kind of intuit which one is going to best suit your kind of lifestyle, your energy use. And then when you add the battery on, it gets even more complicated. So I would love to solve that last bit of complexity by partnering with an energy supplier and creating a new tariff with them that says... When you sign up for this tariff, we as an energy supplier will send you the battery. That allows us to optimize your home to be really low cost using really low cost energy. And we will pass you a fixed amount of savings per month because you have this battery. in your home. So it becomes a much easier kind of decision here. No complex modeling of different tariffs in your head. You just know this tariff gets a fixed discount on my bill because I have the battery in my home. We're not quite there yet, but that's the vision. I think once we do that, we remove the two last kind of hurdles that I see, upfront cost and tariff complexity. So that's why we're really interested to do that.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I mean, it makes the home almost a dispatchable asset. So that should be at scale. That would be really, really interesting. And I mean, I would also see how interesting it could be for, I don't know, appliance manufacturers and sellers and stuff like that also. Because, I mean, in a way, some could argue that the battery would come in competition to changing your dishwasher, washing machine or something like that. but That would be complementary, right? There would be some complementary pathways. And now I'm thinking, for instance, in Italy, when you purchase your primary residence, you get some tax incentives to change your appliances, basically. Yeah, furniture and appliances. That's, you know, this kind of tax credit for this kind of thing. Yeah, it only benefits rich people. But that's still something to take into consideration. but you know, that would be relevant to have batteries inserted in the models as well. So it's probably one of the first time I have such a conversation about batteries. But I think it won't be the last. And I mean, there are so many kind of views that I see to this technology. When are you planning to display it? Are you going to be in Brussels for the Sustainable Energy Week? Because I have a lot of listeners who will be there. So if you bring one of these... No, we didn't. You didn't in your luggage, like in the Eurostar.
Speaker #0
So we did. We were, I mean, where were we? We were in Amsterdam two weeks ago at the Future of Utilities conference. That was the first time we bought this kind of real version of the product with us kind of outside of the office. Does it have a wheel?
Speaker #1
Does it have a name?
Speaker #0
So there is a big flight case to carry around. And I'll reveal a little secret on the podcast. We took most of the batteries out of this one, so we can more easily carry it. Because 25 kilos is light for a battery. We can deliver it, but it's still quite a lot to carry around on the train.
Speaker #1
Spoiler alert, it's the weight of my child. I wouldn't carry her all day.
Speaker #0
Exactly, exactly. But to your question, Belgium, I know, I mean, we don't have a plan to come do that. But maybe we'll chat after this podcast to see if we... see if we should come to that. We've just been through a kind of a run of launch party events starting in the Netherlands, as I said, but then last week was full of back-to-back events around London where we were taking this, and then I think Rob and I are taking a short break from events for now, and then hopefully, yeah, maybe we'll come to the one you mentioned, maybe others, but I mean, follow us on LinkedIn. We always shout about what event we'll be at.
Speaker #1
Thank you so much, Leslie. I've learned so much about batteries and, you know, this podcast is really about making these kind of encounters and making sure that we get to learn from people with a very different perspective. So thank you. Thank you very much for this very candid conversation. I loved it. So thank you and uh, Best of luck for the next steps and enjoy your break. Thank you.
Speaker #0
It's been really great chatting with you. Thank you.
Speaker #1
Energetic explores the people, policies and institutions shaping Europe's and the world's energy transition. I am Marine Cornelis. If you found this conversation valuable, you can share it with colleagues working on housing, governance and consumer protection. You will find references and further reading in the show notes.

About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

The conversations are rigorous and grounded. The guests are people with direct institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in getting this right.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

Energy transitions are failing not because of technology, but because of governance. Who bears the cost of getting it wrong. Who is excluded from the benefits. Who holds the institutions accountable.

The conversations are rigorous and grounded. The guests are people with direct institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in getting this right.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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