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Meghan Wood, CEO of Raya Power, thinks solar and batteries should be as easy to install as a typical household appliance, durable enough to provide backup power for critical devices during storms and heat waves, and sophisticated enough to help lower everyday energy bills.
“Solar can give you a return on investment; it can give you resilience — and I want that to be as normal as getting Wi-Fi,” Wood said.
The Raya Power unit that Wood and cofounder Nicole Gonzalez designed is meant to hit all those marks. Think of it as a portable alternative to rooftop solar, one that looks a bit like an external cellar door from the space age.
The white triangular boxes are topped with 1.35 to 1.8 kilowatts of solar panels and contain 2.5 to 5 kilowatt-hours of battery storage. That blended solar and battery power can be fed into appliances using typical 120-volt or 240-volt plugs, or wired directly to air conditioning systems — all without touching broader household wiring and triggering the need for electrical permits.
In essence, Wood said, it’s a backyard solar ​“all-in-one box — a hybrid inverter, battery, communications, and electronics.” It even comes with enough ballast to keep it solidly on the ground in Category 3 storms. And unlike rooftop solar systems that can take days or weeks to install, permit, and interconnect under utility supervision, a Raya Power installation takes about two hours, ​“and then you’re running dedicated appliances.”
Rooftop solar and battery systems are great for those who can afford them, she said. But they’re out of reach for low-income households and people who rent their homes, like Wood does — an early inspiration for her research into alternative solar-battery combos.
Meanwhile, do-it-yourself balcony solar systems, which are popular in Germany, aren’t yet compatible with current U.S. electrical codes and standards, and that bars them from being plugged into household power sockets — at least for now.
Wood and Gonzalez, who met at a wedding during graduate studies at Stanford University, thought they could design a product that married the best of both those worlds. Gonzalez, who has Puerto Rican roots and was working on the NASA Mars Rover project when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, wanted something her family could have used to keep their lights on and communications up and running after the storm devastated the island’s electrical grid.
And Wood, a Stanford Impact Founder fellow at the university’s Doerr School of Sustainability, wanted a system that could avoid the ​“soft” costs of labor, permitting, and interconnection, which constitute about two-thirds of the total price tag of a typical U.S. rooftop solar and backup battery installation.
“That was the whole goal from the start: How do we eliminate the soft costs?” Wood said. ​“What can you do that avoids any type of permitting, and then go from there?”
Now, with $1 million in pre-seed funding, Wood and Gonzalez are ready to put the technology into the field. Over the coming months, the startup will deploy its first 20 or so units at homes in Puerto Rico and California.
Those units will draw from the grid to power the air conditioners, refrigerators, and other devices they’re connected to when that’s the cheapest option, Wood explained. When the sun is shining, they’ll switch to using solar power for those appliances. But they’ll never push power back to the utility grid, which obviates the need to win utility interconnection approvals.
As for the battery, it’s there for when the power goes out, which is still a common problem in Puerto Rico, Wood said. But it’s also available to store up solar power for use later in the day to offset peak time-of-use rates in California. Raya Power’s software will control the mix of grid, solar, and battery power.
The startup’s first systems are being installed in partnership with philanthropic organizations looking for solar-battery options for low-income communities. That includes the Environmental Defense Fund, which has spent the past few years helping the island of Culebra, Puerto Rico, move toward 100% carbon-free power.
That project has put rooftop solar-battery systems on some commercial buildings and homes, said Dan Whittle, who leads the Environmental Defense Fund’s work in the Caribbean. ​“But without subsidies, public or private, it’s just too expensive to cover 100 percent of low-income homes,” he said.
“Lo and behold, we ran into Nicole and Meghan. They’ve sort of found the missing piece,” he said. Their unit ​“doesn’t provide as much backup power as the conventional systems, but it’s significantly lower cost. And it provides what Culebrans want most, which is peace of mind — resilience.”
The Environmental Defense Fund has won backing from private donors to install eight Raya Power systems in Culebra as a proof of concept. ​“If it works — and I believe it will work — then a lot of lower-income people might have access to it without subsidies, perhaps with a low-interest loan,” Whittle said.
Wood conceded that Raya Power’s pricing has to come down to make the product a good fit for its target customers. Right now, the startup’s systems can be preordered for $6,790 up front, which is competitive with a similarly sized rooftop solar and battery system, she said. Customers can also finance systems for $125 per month at a 6.5% annual percentage rate with a $500 down payment.
To be clear, diesel-fueled backup generators have lower upfront costs for backup power. But they pollute the air, make a racket, and need regular refueling, which isn’t easy during widespread power outages or in the wake of severe storms, particularly on an island like Culebra, Wood said. And setting up generators to power an entire home requires installation of a transfer switch and separate circuit breakers, which can be a costly project.
Portable batteries from companies like Jackery and EcoFlow are another affordable choice, and can power air conditioners or refrigerators for hours at a time. Many now can be purchased with foldout solar panels that recharge the units, though slowly. But as with generators, these systems are primarily meant for emergencies, not as always-on tools for storing solar power and reducing home energy costs.
Raya Power’s systems, by contrast, can lower monthly utility bills by using solar-charged battery power to replace costly on-peak grid power for air conditioning, refrigeration, and other connected loads, Wood said. The company estimates that customers of Puerto Rico utility Luma Energy could save about $50 per month and that customers of California utility Pacific Gas & Electric could save about $80 per month.
That’s roughly equivalent to the savings from a rooftop solar and battery system of the same size, according to Wood. But unlike rooftop solar, a Raya Power system can go with someone when they move or be sold to someone else.
That portability also makes for simpler financing, given that Raya Power systems could be repossessed if the owner can’t make the payments. ​“You’re not buying a construction project that’s never leaving your home,” Wood said.
These are important factors in markets where many households lack credit ratings that would qualify them for traditional rooftop solar loans or power purchase agreements, Wood added. ​“We’re getting a lot of excitement from solar installers in Puerto Rico,” where a lot of potential customers ​“can’t do a rooftop solar system because they lack an adequate FICO score,” she said.
Raya Power is exploring lower-cost financing mechanisms such as loans offered by Puerto Rico’s ​“cooperativas,” community-owned lending institutions that have played a central role in the island’s solar and battery renaissance in the wake of Hurricane Maria. ​“They have flexible terms and rates in the 4% to 7% range,” Wood said. Community development financial institutions and green banks could play similar roles in California and other early markets, she added.
For its first round of deployments, Raya Power will use professional installers but is developing a ​“roadmap … to get it to a do-it-yourself system,” Wood said.
In Puerto Rico, it’s enlisting local installers coming out of the training centers run by the nonprofit Grid Alternatives. Of the 161 trainees that have graduated from the program in the past two years, 41% are women, said Gabriel Pacheco, Grid Alternatives’ regional manager for Puerto Rico.
“Some of the women that have taken our course connected with Raya, and they’ve secured mostly part-time or contract jobs to set up the pilot” in Culebra, he said. ​“That’s an awesome initiative on their end.”
Raya Power’s system ​“might not fulfill all the energy needs of a family.” But it’s great for ​“providing backup power without the cost of permitting [or] a constraint on time,” Pacheco said. ​“Having systems like those Raya is developing that you can plug and play, and take with you to wherever you live, anywhere you have space — it addresses the needs of what I think is a big segment of the population.”
An update and a clarification were made on Dec. 12, 2025: Members of Raya Power co-founder Nicole Gonzalez’s family live in Puerto Rico, but Gonzalez was not born in Puerto Rico and her parents do not live there.
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