RaVolt: Turning your Home into a Microgrid

The transcription of the video is below. 

Origins of RaVolt: How RaVolt was Born within a Utility-Focused EPC Firm

Kerim: Hi, everyone! This is Kerim, Kerim Baran with Solar Academy. I have today with me Josh Weaver of RaVolt. I had the pleasure to meet RaVolt at RE plus this past year in Vegas. And we chatted a little bit about your products at the show, Josh, and I thought you guys would be a perfect fit for Solar Academy in educating our audience about the types of solutions that you guys are putting out there.

So, welcome and good to have you.

Josh: Yeah, awesome thanks. Thanks for having us. We’re excited to talk about RaVolt as an organization today, and as well as our product and how it fits into the market, and how it can support installation folks in really growing their market, and their ability to access different parts of the solar market that they’re maybe not going after today.

Kerim: Yeah. One of the things I noticed about or that I liked about RaVolt is that you guys are a- almost like an organically grown start up from inside a bigger utility focus DPC firm, United Renewable Energy.

And so, you have felt the pain firsthand if you will of certain types of clients, customers. And you’ve had a vision to create a solution that serves a gap in the market. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that evolution, that story, and how that evolve into–

Josh: Yeah sure, where we came from is really like it just lives and breathes why we created a product, the current product that we created. Right? So, we said, we’re RaVolt. We’re a part of a company called United Renewable Energy Group.

And we were really spun off, we’re sister company to them. It was created around 2016, is when the first ideas started to come. And they’re- the primarily focus of our sister company is building utility scale or community scale, solar fields.

So, they’re- first and foremost in their head are the problems with building in the complications with installation, and how that can change your timeline and really change your cost of the product right?

What they saw at the time was that– this is still true today. It was- there’s a mindset in the residential space where, we’re gonna build this project like each individual project as it is. And we’re gonna have these different Lego blocks and pieces that we put together on someone’s wall or inside.

And the idea was, why isn’t there a factory-built product that does this? Why isn’t there a product that brings everything together? Not just like the components, but it also takes the installer mindset. And saying, “What can I add and what can I put on my product that just makes life easy on- in the field?”.

Because that’s the goal. The goal is that you can have a product that is repeatable every single time, and in that you can account for how long it’s going to take you to install this thing. And I think it shows in our product. Once you learn our product, why we put things where it is, why we designed it the way we did.

You can tell that we came from this organization, that is focused on building things. And that was really the inspiration. For the overall design and the overall thought of just RaVolt as a company in total.

We started off like we said, we know we started off as– we were installing these units. We were GCing these jobs, cause that’s where we came from, was the GC world. But we’ve completely morphed our organization into being a product-focused company. Our value is the box that we built; our value is making our installers lives easier on site.

And so, we’re working with partners nationwide, who want to rep our product, who want to sell our product. Because they see that it’s easier than putting a bunch of things together on site, in like engineering, a custom solution at each site.

Why would you do that when you can have a factory-built, factory-integrated, factory-tested piece of equipment that is ready to drop in place for you on site. That’s kind of where we are today versus where we came from, just first starting the over the overall company.

RaVolt’s Grid Optional Whole-Home Solution and How it’s Different than its Alternatives

Kerim: Talking about the products. If I remember correctly, you had some off-grid focus maybe in the PC Company or in the types of challenges that you were seeing. And then I think your first iteration of your design was focused on off-grid and grid-tide.

Can you tell us a little bit about the product and its current focus where there’s residential grid-tied, off-grid. What components come together in the product? How does it make it different than other solutions in the market?

Josh: Yeah, sure. So, the first generation of the product would certainly was like, a very off-grid approach. It was– as you can see in my background behind me, like mostly put together with ground mount arrays.

Our unit would be underneath that array, and we would be powering a house, a complete home off-grid. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be grid-tied. But it’s still– it was a primary off-grid approach. So, our revision, since we’ve revised our unit to make a little more streamlined, we’ve included a lot of other comp– any C compliant pieces that are needed for grid-tied applications. We really are a both– a whole home solution as well.

It’s not just an off-grid only product. We can mate with roof mount panels. We have rapid shutdown ready devices built-in and ready to go for your installation. And we can do grid-tied or off-grid, or we can do grid-tied with generator. It allows us to just be versatile in the overall industry how we apply our product.

But we still keep intact the idea that we want to supply your power with whole-home power. We don’t want to rely on any net metering, or we don’t want to rely on any type of agreement that you have with a third-party utility, that you would be relying on that to make the economics of the system work, or to make- to get payback so your bill is reduced.

Our goal, as even in our grid-tied product, is that we supply you with power. We supply you with your whole power, we store your energy. Yes, if we can sell back in a grid-tied, and you want to sell back in a grid-tied scenario, we can. But that’s an added benefit to our systems, it’s not the primary reason for our systems.

The Anatomy of RaVolt’s Box: Turning a Home into a Microgrid

Kerim: So, would it be then fair to say that there, like RaVolt, is a key part of creating a micro grid type solution on an independent property. And can you tell us a little bit about like, what that could look like? What are the components that are part of RaVolt. And what would be the components that would fall outside of the scope of your product, and how you connect to them, and how does it all fit together?

Josh: Yeah, sure. So, we’re the critical power piece of the micro grid. Our system has an inverter and batteries. And then all the connection points that you need to properly connect to different pieces and parts of the power producing components to your micro grid. Whether it be hydro, whether it be wind or obviously solar, being the number one there.

But we can connect to all those and we have the ability within our box for you to have simple inputs. I’m gonna input my solar. I’m gonna input my hydro generator. I’m gonna input my wind turbine. And in all of that, all the magic happens inside the box. When we put all that inside a box, it was the focus being that this box sits outside of your home.

You don’t have to worry about digging your car door in your garage or you don’t have a Lego set, or in a rector set, or a Tetris wall, I guess, is what we kind of referred to it, on your garage wall, or outside of your home.

It’s this nice box. It’s very– it’s independent of itself. It’s lockable. You can’t enter it. And it just creates an environment inside of our box to have all of those pieces and components working properly at any given time with any given environment. That’s our focus. Our focus is, we’re gonna make this box so that you do not have to enter it.

You only have to enter the pieces where you need to connect in. And that is all basically on the outside of your box, which would just be a normal electrical connection. You’re knocking out a regular knockout. And you’re not doing any types of custom work from the A/C connection point in. And that’s really the focus in what’s a part of the overall system of a RaVolt box.

RaVolt’s Ideal Customer Profile

Kerim: And so, what is an ideal customer profile for you? Is it an off-grid home in the rural setting. Is it a campus? Is it something in between? Who are some of your customers? And–

Josh: Yeah, there’s a few cascading aspects of an ideal customer for us. Number one, being that they wanna be energy independent. Okay? If their motivation is to be independent of relying on the utility grid, that’s a good customer for RaVolt.

In addition to that, like you typically, I’d say, a more rural setting is likely a major aspect of an ideal customer for us. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a rural customer, but someone that’s maybe got an acre of land that has the ability to mostly have either a ground mount array, or they have a simple roof structure that they can put roof mount on.

Because mostly those people coincide. When you’re- when you don’t have- when you’re not inside of a city or major metropolitan area in United States, the electricity is not nearly as reliable. Also, it might be a longer period of time if something does go wrong but you’re experiencing an outage, right?

And so, when you combine those aspects of that, you really get like that ideal customer of someone that says, “You know, I can’t go without power. I need power. And I can’t actually rely, that if something does happen. A major storm or a major outage, it could be days that I’m out of electricity. I need to make sure that my well pump is working. I need to make sure that my refrigerator stays running. And that’s very important to me.”

So those would be like the two probably core aspects of a RaVolt customer or an ideal RaVolt customer.

Kerim: Yeah. And I remember in one of our previous conversations, you mentioning one of your like ideal or case studies. I guess what became a case study for the company was, one of your customers was, a certain distance away from the grid, so they there needed– there was this need to build a half a mile or a mile of extra wiring to reach the property.

And the economics of that compared to building a full on off-grid system with RaVolt as the core piece of that solution was when the full economics of these types of solutions make sense. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Because if you think about traditional typical utility companies that are serving a Metro area.

But then there’s a bunch of rural customers, usually the metro area rate payers are subsidizing the rural customers. So, what you’re doing actually brings a good balance to the economics of how to power every property across the nation.

Josh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like the most economical and equitable way. Like land is a finite thing, right? And so, as what we’re seeing is as folks maybe move away from a metropolitan area, and maybe they buy—

Kerim: When the trend started with Covid, probably–

Josh: –right? Which started during—

Kerim: –Yeah.

Josh: –yes, there’s been a lot of exodus out of metropolitan areas. Since the pandemic, right? But there might not be the most best acre lot pieces left or maybe they’re great. But it’s a right of way, that you’re required through somebody else’s land, and that you’re- you want to put your home a half a mile off the property.

Well, there’s like an economic feedback for that. You don’t just call up your local utility and say, “Hey, I’m building a house here, bring the electricity”. They’re gonna send you a bill, too. Right? What we found is that those can be expensive and that another ideal customer of RaVolt is this homesteader type of mindset, where it’s where I built my piece of property and I’m gonna build a house on it.

And that may be like I said. It may be a half a mile from the local- the closest utility. That might be an 80-thousand-dollar bill from the utility to say, “Hey, I’m going to- I should do it underground, or I have to put polls in?”

The utility owns to the transformer. They’re gonna set the transformer clear out by your house, and so that can be super expensive. And so, there are a lot of times when people have these types of things where we may be able to do this cheaper.

And then a lot of cases we have, the payoff is about a half a mile. That’s what we’ve seen. You know, the module costs continue to come down, so maybe we’re a third of a mile at this point. But if you have a property, and you’re building a house, and you want to think about that.

Give us a call, we can help you do this. And we have a lot of experience. During this week, we find people all over the country in this scenario where let’s just call it 80 thousand dollars to bring in utility. And that’s great. That’s a reliable form of power. But you get- it’s like, “Hey, give us 80 thousand dollars for the privilege to pay us a monthly bill”.

So, why don’t we just do off-grid instead, right? And we’ve done this in all over the country from upstate New York to a farmland in Alabama, to the mountains in Colorado. We do this all over the country and help these people make these types of economic decisions. And I will say we’re very truthful company in this area too.

We have payoff calculators, and we can help you make that decision. And if the decision means that you don’t go upgrade, that’s fine, too. We just want to be a reliable source of information for you. When you make these types of important decisions about a piece of land that you bought, or your final home, like this is your dream. This can be your dream, and we just want to make sure that it’s something that is actually feasible for you. So, we’re very truthful when we talk to customers in those circumstances.

Challenges of the Grid and Innovative Grid Optional Energy Solutions for Homeowners

Kerim: Yeah. This brings up to mind, my- the one concept that we talk about frequently on Solar Academy is the concept of God parity versus grid parity. Most people understand the concept of grid parity. Where utility scale solar farms produce power at lower than pretty much coal, gas, plants, and everything else. Of course, with the limitation that that’s for daytime only when the sun is up.

And the god parity concept is when local solar panels it could be, for a single home or a commercial property, coupled with battery on the property producing full time power to that property. When that becomes cheaper than utility delivered power. That’s a- or actually half that price of a utility delivered power.

Because what most people don’t understand is half the price- half the dollars they’re paying to the utility companies for distribution, for transmission and distribution, and the other half is for generation. Solar is already beating the generation piece, but the transmission piece is key because you don’t have full time power in most solar settings yet, but with the battery costs and the panel costs coming down so fast.

We’re gonna be there pretty soon, and like you’re saying half a mile is that cut off, and maybe it’s one-third mile now. So, how is this mindset changing in the market? And what else is required for more people to understand that solar plus battery and other types of generation locally coordinated with our RaVolt like system is a feasible solution that is probably going to grow rapidly over the coming years?

Josh: Yeah, a lot of it, I mean. And thanks to what I think, what Solar Academy is doing a lot of it is education at this point, like understanding the environment that we’re in, in the grid. I mean, you still have a grid that was primarily built in the 60s and 70s from the transmission perspective or distribution is starting to become a little more up to date.

But you still have an older grid that was built on this model of, big generation in one area going to a big sink, a big load in another area. And I guess the issues with that are – it’s an older, and it’s not as reliable. There is reliability issues in certain- in a lot of the parts of the country.

I mean, you’re seeing it, you see, in California, you see in some of the biggest economies in the country, right? California, Texas, all these areas where you’ve got issues with grid reliability. That’s one of the thing.

The other thing is just increased costs. I mean, how many articles have we seen in the last year of Georgia power increasing their rates by 12 percent, or this utility or that utility doing a scaled factor, where maybe it’s going to be 40 percent by 2030 is what your energy costs are gonna be increasing.

And then you combine that with net metering essentially going away. We’re in the early stages of that. But let’s be honest, by 2030 net metering doesn’t exist. Let’s just put it in. That’s not gonna exist. And so, the utilities cannot continue to pay you retail rates back, they can’t afford it.

Kerim: Make sense for the first ten percent of customers. But after that you really have to—

Josh: After that—

Kerim: –curtail all that—

Josh: That’s right.

Kerim: –as we’re seeing in the California market, I think they still got a- I think the right thing to do is to play nice and create hybrid solutions. But we gotta be also fair to the utilities that we can’t expect them to pay full retail price–

Josh: Yeah.

Kerim: –at the same time, utilities gotta realize that they gotta become more competitive and not act like a sloth-y monopolies and continue functioning on the cost-plus models which just increases their prices faster than inflation, pretty much everywhere in the country.

So yeah, I get that.

Josh: Yeah, or they have to be innovative, right? I mean, you’re seeing some utilities kind of go to, as they can’t afford to pay retail. It’s like, well, maybe it makes sense for us to own these micro grid assets, right? It maybe it makes sense for us to like, deploy these micro grid assets to houses or to rural areas of our- because it might cost us less. We are seeing that.

But not trying to bash on the utilities because they’re very reliable source of energy for us. But, as that whole- as that thing changes all of these things that we’ve talked about. I guess, it just makes battery backup and micro grid assets at the residential level more and more economical.

All these things that happen continue to make it more realistic for somebody to say, “Well, I’m just gonna make my own and do my own.” Like, “I’m gonna get a decent micro grid. I’m gonna have a regular 15-kilowatt array. And I’m gonna throw on a 20 KW generator because I wanna cook with gas, anyway. I’m gonna have this micro grid that, I’m just gonna own my own energy.”

Because it’s a reality for people today. And it’s a reality all the way down the line from a 4000 square foot mansion to a 200 square foot tiny home or a 400 square foot tiny home. These- not just RaVolt solutions, but there are solutions that scale to the abilities to really just have somebody be completely energy independent. Which is what we love to do—

Kerim: -independence—

Josh: — we get to be a part of one of the happiest days of our owners lives. When they get to like, turn the grid off. People love it for some reason. They just, they love it. And it’s great for RaVolt. It’s great for us that we’ve provided a solution that, through our local partners, can be turn keyed.

Or it’s also such an easy solution like there’s a lot of DIY, people that are doing it and just buying a box and doing it themselves. It’s a very, very fulfilling part of the solar industry to be in. And we hope that it can continue to grow. And we can continue to work with utilities to make better solutions and better decisions for the average homeowner in a given territory.

RaVolt’s Nationwide Partnership Strategy and Pricing

Kerim: Makes sense. So, talking about the go to market piece of RaVolt. Can you tell us a little bit of who do you partner? How do you sell the solutions? How do you- who installs them? And can the customers come direct to you? Can they self-install? And then, maybe talk a little bit about cost range of the various solutions as well.

Josh: Yeah, sure. So, there’s two different paths in RaVolt. We- if you come to us, if you search RaVolt we’ll probably find you with our marketing and get you an ad at some points. But if you fill out a form on our website, and you say I want a system, but I want somebody to install it.

Well, we have a complete network of a national network of installers whole area around the country that are local installers. They know their market. They know their AHJ. They know all the rules in- they’ve likely installed a RaVolt box already. We can get you a turnkey. We’ll get you over to one of our partners, and you can actually go on our website and like, find your local partner and go directly to them if you’d want to be able to support our customers locally with the best people.

We’re a product manufacturer built in Georgia, and we don’t necessarily know the rules in like somewhere in Iowa or somewhere in Arizona, we don’t know those local rules. So, we have a complete partner network that we work with. We may talk to you, or we may support you with our local partners to help them make the best decision on what size of a system that you want.

But that would be the primary go to market strategy for RaVolt at this point. We’re constantly onboarding and bringing on partners because there’s a real need for our product to take what our partners are doing today and just expand their solar capabilities. Let them go sort out more customers because they have now a product that they can be confident in putting out on the market and putting out to a customer.

So that’s the one way. And like I said earlier, we do have- we do sell the box where you can go by the box on our website. If you want in for self-install. The people that come in are attracted to RaVolt are a lot of times handy folk, so we wanna—

Kerim: General contractor, electrical contractor, yourself it’s totally DIY-able.

Josh: –yeah, totally DIY-able. And that’s one of the major- we talked about the differences before like putting together a troph and then inverter batteries and putting all these in your wall, that takes an expert that has done this before.

We do all the hard parts for an installer, a regular an EC, a GC. They can install these things by themselves if they don’t need to necessarily have battery experience to do this. Because our customer service, our support staff is there to help those customers do that. I’ll touch a little bit on the cost piece.

Like I said, we go all the way from our tiny cabin solution. So those boxes which would be inverter battery, and all the pieces and parts to connect easily to the system. They start around 20 thousand, just the box. And then our box will go upwards of about 80 thousand dollars, for a either a dual or three inverter system. These are for large four thousand square foot plus homes.

So, our box goes like from 40 to 80, and then you roughly double that for the remainder. So, you’re looking somewhere between, smaller end of the systems like we can get into the 60s, but really like 60 to maybe 150 thousand would be a total turnkey price for us for everything.

And that’s obviously based off of scaling from what is a five KW array to a 40 Kw array, there’s a massive difference between those systems. But those are roughly what you would pay for a full off-grid system—

Kerim: This is all the batteries are obviously to make sure that you have enough power to last through several cloudy days, I would say.

Josh: That’s right. And we have a lot of experience doing this. Even though we do a lot of grid-tied systems that say, price, 60 percent of our customers are just fully off-grid. So even when you are a grid-tied customer, we bring this off-grid mindset to it. And so, they’re likely a more robust system than what you would be used to.

We treat ourselves like we are a utility when we do an off-grid customer. We’re ready to answer the phone at 8’clock at night on a Saturday if your power goes out. Because we want to be reaching above these 95, 98, 99 percent reliability in an off-grid scenario. That takes a lot of redundancy, that takes a lot of resiliency of the overall product. That’s just the mindset that RaVolt brings.

Kerim: Right. Josh, thank you very much for this wealth of information that you shared with us.

Josh: Wonderful. Yeah, thanks for your time. We really enjoyed it. And if you- if anybody needs to reach us; it’s RaVolt.us or you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, anything, just search RaVolt.

Kerim: Alrighty, thank you very much.

Josh: Thank you.