Going Permissionless with Cole Ashman,CEO and Founder of Pila Energy

Going Permissionless with Cole Ashman,CEO and Founder of Pila Energy

From DER Task Force by DER Task Force

July 2, 2025 · 1h 38m

About this episode

Cole Ashman discusses the concept of permissionless DERs and his journey in the energy sector.

We’re back! This time with Cole Ashman, Founder and CEO of Pila Energy. Permissionless DERs are one of most exciting new categories for us. With all the focus on permitting challenges, high soft costs, and long interconnection cues, what if we could just install DERs without all of that nonsense? In the ep, we talk about Cole’s journey from experiencing Hurricane Katrina awakening him to the need for resilience to working at Tesla, Span, and now Pila, Ben Franklin shocking people at parties, whether permissionless batteries have actual physical advantages over grid-tied batteries, how backfeeding into circuits works and what permitting reform could look like, balcony solar, storage manufacturing and supply chains, and so much more! Note: we had a bad connection between our recording device and computer, leading to a bunch of skips. Our fearless editor did his best to clean these up, but some may remain. This also means we can’t post the video because it messed with the timecodes. Sorry! We’ll do better next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dertaskforce.com/subscribe

People in this episode

Guest: Cole Ashman

Topics covered

  • permissionless DERs
  • resilience
  • energy storage
  • permitting reform
  • solar energy
  • supply chains

Keywords

  • permissionless DERs
  • energy resilience
  • Hurricane Katrina
  • Tesla
  • solar energy
  • battery technology
  • permitting challenges

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Pila Energy, Tesla, Span

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