Designing Home Energy: A Conversation with Balto's New Head of Product, Carl Lenox
By: Regan Keller
Last month we shared that Carl Lenox has joined Team Balto as our new Head of Product, and later that same night I attended Powerhouse’s New Dawn event at Drake’s in Oakland. Suffice it to say, it was a good time to be repping Balto swag at the most popular climate tech party in the Bay. Several people wanted to talk about the big news.
Carl has established a reputation as a leader in solar, storage, and DERs, known for designing and implementing many impactful innovations shaping our industry. His subject matter expertise and experience give him a sixth sense about where the industry is headed. One person at the party summed it up nicely by saying, “Carl is very selective about where he works. Where goes Carl, goes the industry.”
So I sat down with Carl to find out what spoke to him about Balto’s mission and opportunity.
Q: You’ve dedicated your career to accelerating innovation in home energy. What drew you to Balto as the next place to make an impact?
Carl Lenox: Four years ago we were all talking about the Green New Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act. There seemed to be so many tailwinds behind home electrification, but much of that promise didn’t materialize.
There were several reasons for this, but two major factors stand out to me. First, established companies had competing core business priorities that kept them from being able to develop the new initiatives needed to meet the opportunity. And second, there were several failed startups that, while well intentioned, had subsidy-dependent business models that were not sustainable.
We need companies that can move quickly to meet the opportunity and solutions that are designed from deeply understood first principles, not startups chasing trends or subsidy bubbles. Balto is both of those things. Balto’s solution is centered on customer needs, and its DNA is based on design thinking, modeling, and systems-level problem-solving, with a Gen AI native foundation. That’s incredibly compelling.
What we’re building is ambitious. We’re helping people along their journey to energy independence, based on their specific situation as it evolves over time. We’re making it possible for people to benefit from solar-led electrification, while offering a customer experience that’s low-friction and builds value over time. It’s incredibly complex, but James and Frank are the right people for the job. Their domain expertise is deep, complementary, and perfectly matched to the moment. I’m thrilled to join them.
Q: You’ve said Balto’s approach is fundamentally different from other companies working on this issue. What is particularly compelling to you about Balto’s business model, platform, and opportunity for growth?
Carl: There are three pillars that I find most compelling about Balto’s approach. The first is that Balto is working with strong regional contractors, companies like Northern Pacific Power Systems, whose reputations are built on trust and word-of-mouth in their community. This creates a fundamentally different sales motion and company culture focused on quality and delivering customer value over the long term. We are also uniquely tailoring third-party owned financial products that are tailored to these contractors, who have historically focused on cash and consumer financing.
Secondly, Balto’s modeling engine is designed to accurately represent our customer’s homes, specifically how and when they use energy, and how that connects to what really matters to consumers––comfort, health, reliability, independence, affordability and predictability of energy costs––harnessed to rich data streams for continuous refinement.
This allows us to make recommendations that are appropriate for the customers’ needs and their unique objectives. It also allows us to help the customer on a long-term journey, where we deliver value on an ongoing basis, based on scenario analysis. Paired with the operational excellence delivered by our contractor partners, this results in very high quality assets which generate reliable cash flows.
And finally, we’re layering on emerging agentic AI capabilities to be able to understand data, run models, and reason through the results. This makes our experience very consultative and personalized, but also highly scalable. We’re building mass customization to meet our customers at the right moment, help them make an electrification decision, and make it easy to move forward.
That combination is rare. It’s what gives Balto its edge.
Q: What will your first priorities be in your new role and what excites you most about the journey ahead?
Carl: It’s a learning sprint. I’ll be spending a lot of time with our partners at Northern Pacific going to installs, visiting with customers, and understanding the contractor experience firsthand. I’ll work closely with James and Frank, doing assumption mapping and hypothesis validation to make sure we’re building the right product at the right depth––that sort of thing. My focus is mapping our value to Balto’s three “customers”––consumers, contractors, and financiers. You can think of it like a combination lock: when all three align, that’s when real transformation happens.
The chance to build something that genuinely moves the needle is what excites me most. Solar-led home electrification offers a huge opportunity to deliver real customer value and climate impact, but homeowners have to overcome too many hurdles to reap these benefits. Balto is uniquely poised to tackle this challenge. If we do this right, and crack the combination lock, we can help contractors become holistic energy advisors, give homeowners energy independence and all of the benefits of electrification, and help financiers be catalysts for scalable, sustainable impact. That’s a future I want to help build. Balto isn’t following the industry’s playbook, we’re writing a new one, and I’m thrilled to be part of that story.
Carl brings 20+ years of expertise in product strategy, design thinking, and energy modeling to the Balto team, having led transformative innovations in solar, battery, and DER technology at Sunrun, SunPower, and TotalEnergies.
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