Explaining Texture to My Mom

Over the holidays, I found myself in my mom's living room trying to explain what my company, Texture, actually does. My mom lives outside of Rochester, NY. Her sister—my Aunt Sue—lives in Texas, where energy prices can swing wildly. Aunt Sue's always curious about our work but has a bunch of questions. I realized this stuff can be pretty confusing, so I'm writing this post in a way that my mom and Aunt Sue (and anyone else who's not an energy nerd) can understand. Here goes!

Texture is a platform that helps businesses (not individual homeowners) connect to and control energy devices—like whole home batteries, solar inverters, and even electric meters. In tech-speak, we're what's called B2B (Business-to-business), meaning our customers are other companies that serve everyday homeowners. The end goal: help people save money, keep the grid stable, and reduce the need for polluting power sources.

Rather than list everything Texture can do, let's focus on one real-world scenario: using a home battery in Texas to make extra money by charging when electricity is cheap and selling back to the grid when prices are high—often called "energy arbitrage." It's a bit like buying ice in winter when it's cheap and selling it in summer when it's valuable. But first, let's talk about why whole home batteries are even a thing nowadays.

#Why Whole Home Batteries Are Taking Off

Over the past decade, technology for Lithium Ion batteries (the same kind used in phones, laptops, and electric cars) has gotten much cheaper and more efficient. That means companies can now make big batteries for homes without a sky-high price tag—like how flat-screen TVs went from super-expensive to pretty affordable.

And since the cost of solar panels has dropped, more people have solar on their roofs. But solar panels make power during the day when a lot of us aren't home, so that energy can go to waste if you don't use it or store it. Enter the home battery!

• Store Power: Stash energy from your solar panels during the day for use at night.
• Backup Power: If the grid goes down, you've got a backup to keep the lights on.
• Sell Surplus to the Grid: If there's extra juice, you can send it back and potentially earn money or credit on your bill.

#The Electric Grid as a Two-Way Street

Traditionally, electricity flows one way: from the power plant to your home. But if you have solar or a battery, you can actually push power back to the grid. Think of power lines like water pipes—if your "tank" (battery) has extra water, you can send some of that water back into the main system for your neighbors. In some places, you even get paid for doing it through a program called net metering. Net metering basically means your utility keeps track of how much electricity you send back and either credits or pays you for any surplus.

#How Texas (ERCOT) Makes This Interesting

Aunt Sue lives in Texas, which has its own power market run by ERCOT (that's the Electric Reliability Council of Texas—basically the organization that manages Texas's power grid). One of the unique things about ERCOT is that electricity prices change every five minutes based on demand. On a scorching summer day when everyone cranks their AC, demand spikes, prices shoot up, and the grid strains under the load.

If you have a home battery:

1. Charge up when electricity is cheap or when your solar panels are producing.
2. Sell back to the grid when prices are high.

Think of it like a smart investment app that automatically buys low and sells high based on market conditions—except instead of stocks, we're dealing with electricity. No one needs to constantly watch energy prices or manually flip switches; companies can use Texture's platform to automate decisions based on their own rules and schedules, or they can manage things more directly—it's up to them.

#The Power of Working Together

One battery by itself might not seem like much—kind of like how a single raindrop doesn't make a flood. But when you connect thousands of batteries together? Now that's powerful. This is where Texture really shines. We help businesses coordinate large groups of batteries to work together, creating what's called a "Virtual Power Plant" (VPP).

#Virtual Power Plants (VPPs): Acting Like a Power Plant

When a company manages, say, 10,000 home batteries, collectively they act as a Virtual Power Plant. When you add up all that stored energy, it's enough to replace or supplement a small power plant—potentially offsetting the need for a couple of "peaker" plants that only fire up when energy demand is sky-high.

• Less Pollution: Instead of burning coal or gas in an emergency, the grid can tap into thousands of home batteries.
• Grid Stability: Fewer blackouts or brownouts because the system can pull from these batteries when the grid gets overloaded.

#Proving It All Worked

Here's something cool about Texture that even Aunt Sue would appreciate: we're like a fitness tracker for your battery. Just as your smart watch proves you actually completed your workout and hit your goals, Texture tracks and verifies that batteries delivered the promised power to the grid. This verification helps ensure everyone gets properly credited for their contribution—so when Aunt Sue's battery helps keep her neighborhood's lights on during a Texas heat wave, there's proof it did its job!

#Small Slice of What Texture Can Do

Remember how I said my Aunt Sue’s Texas battery example is just one story? That’s exactly it—it’s just one scenario. Texture handles a whole lot more around energy devices and data, from orchestrating fleets of batteries to analyzing real-time grid conditions. If you can plug it in or power it on, Texture can likely help manage it and make sense of the data flowing from it.

#Why Texture?

Managing all these moving parts can get pretty complicated. That's why we built Texture around four main ideas that make everything work smoothly:

1. Real-Time Visibility
   Just like checking your bank balance instantly, we help businesses see exactly what their batteries are doing right now and not a month later (the current industry standard).

2. Data Controls and Security
   We keep everything safe and private—kind of like how your online banking keeps your money secure.

3. Universal Access
   We make sure everyone who needs the information can get it easily, like having your fitness tracking data show up on both your phone and your watch.

4. Data Harmonization
   We make sure all the information plays nicely together—like having one remote that controls all your TV devices instead of five different ones.

#Wrapping It Up

Whether you're in Texas like Aunt Sue, Rochester like Mom, or anywhere else in between, I'd love to chat more about how Texture is helping shape the future of energy. Contact us to learn more, or check out our product page to dive deeper into how it all works.