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What happens when the lights go out? For most of us, it’s just an inconvenience. But for millions of households and small businesses, outages mean life-saving medicine spoils, work grinds to a halt, and daily life becomes uncertain.

This week on Things Have Changed, we’re joined by Cole Ashman, founder of Pila Energy, who is on a mission to make backup power accessible to everyone.

From growing up in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to working on cutting-edge energy products, Cole has seen firsthand how fragile the grid can be — and how urgently we need solutions that work for all people, not just homeowners with deep pockets.

With Pila, Cole and his team are building portable, modular, and intelligent batteries that can protect what matters most — whether that’s a fridge, a CPAP machine, or your home office.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why today’s grid challenges (aging infrastructure, AI-driven demand, climate disasters) make resilience more urgent than ever
• The problem with traditional backup power and who gets left behind
• How distributed, plug-and-play batteries can scale faster than big infrastructure projects
• Why resilience should be a right, not a privilege

🎧 If you care about technology, climate, or the future of energy, this conversation will change the way you think about power — and what it means to stay resilient.

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Things Have Changed