home-energy
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The Electrician Who Never Came to Quote
Treehouse’s wager is that the hardest part of electrification is not the charger, battery or heat pump. It is the unruly journey from “I want one” to a permitted wire in the wall - and the company is trying to turn that journey into a product.
Benjamin Tuff Is Teaching the Home to Behave Like a Power Company
After helping turn a three-person travel startup into a business acquired by Airbnb, the Montreal marketer moved from selling escape to explaining energy independence. His latest challenge is making the electric car feel less like transportation and more like part of the house.
The $100 Box That Turns 400,000 Homes Into a Power Plant
A former commodities trader noticed homeowners were flying blind on their own electricity. So he sold them a $100 box - and started wiring 400,000 basements into a grid-scale power plant.
John Ahlman Wants the Solar App to Be the Thing You Show Your Neighbors
SolarEdge's North America marketing chief has a practical theory of the energy transition: make the hardware work together, make the data legible, and give a happy homeowner something worth showing at the kitchen table.
The Texas Electric Co-op That Put a Battery Fleet Behind the Meter
Born to electrify farms that private utilities passed over, GVEC now links poles, fiber, thermostats and home batteries into one regional system. Its next trick is turning thousands of member-owned devices into useful capacity for the Texas grid.
Plentify
Plentify is a South African climate-tech company that builds AI-driven hardware and software to intelligently manage home energy use. Its flagship device, HotBot, is a smart controller for electric water heaters (geysers) that shifts heating to when power is cheaper and cleaner, while its SolarBot companion maximizes solar self-consumption. Founded in 2017 by Jon Kornik and Kailas Nair, Plentify links water heaters, batteries and solar inverters into a coordinated energy platform that cuts household electricity costs and eases pressure on strained grids. The company raised a roughly $15M Series A in 2025 to expand from South Africa into the UK, Australia and Brazil.