A letter from our co-founder on our biggest release to date
Hear first-hand from our co-founder, Manuel, why our biggest product release to date is personal. From the Operations Center to Ask Popular, each feature builds on his experience mananging 30,000 distributed solar assets over a decade.
Ten years ago I was running my first company, iluméxico, where we installed more than 30,000 solar systems in rural Mexico. We never imagined we would one day have tools as capable as the AI available to us now.
Every day we had to decide what deserved our attention: site performance, the situation of each customer, sales opportunities, operational problems, and a seemingly endless list of things we could improve.
It was energizing and frustrating at the same time. We knew opportunities were slipping past us, and we had no clear way to understand the return on our next action. We prioritized through experience and intuition. A learning loop that told us which decisions had actually created value would have been worth more than almost anything else we could have bought.
Today, in conversations with commercial and industrial solar operators, I keep finding the same problem.
Teams react to alarms and customer complaints, and they cannot always identify where the biggest opportunities are. Asset management gets treated as a burden required to hit generation targets, protect the company's reputation, and earn the next sale.
I believe that misses the point.
A distributed solar asset can operate for 30 years or more. The best operators will do more than react when something breaks. They will make sure we capture the full value of every installation, every dollar of savings, and every avoided ton of emissions across that entire life.
That is why we rebuilt Popular Power around one simple question: what needs attention today, and what is acting on it worth?
Operations Center turns thousands of signals into a short list of priorities. Ask Popular lets an operator question their portfolio, analyze performance, and produce a client-ready report in natural language. And Recoverable Value puts a dollar figure on what resolving each problem is worth over the next 60 days, which is the exact instrument I was missing at Iluméxico. Ten years ago I ranked a day's work by instinct. An operator on the platform today ranks it by what each decision returns.
It is the learning loop I wish we had a decade ago, turning operational intuition into systematic, data-backed decisions, informed by cumulative experience of people managing these assets every day.
For me, this is also the continuation of a deeply personal mission.
We have always believed the energy transition must be democratized. At iluméxico that meant helping rural homes and businesses reach a technology that was seen as something only large corporations and wealthy households could afford. Today it means giving every operator putting more solar into a world that badly needs it access to the best technology available, and to the leverage AI gives them.
I used to point out a sad irony: rural communities are often among the least responsible for climate change and among those who suffer its consequences most.
Now I see a second irony, and this one is full of possibility. One of the most energy-intensive technologies ever built can be pointed directly at making distributed solar more efficient, more bankable, and easier to deploy for decades to come.
AI does not replace an experienced operator's judgment. What it does is make that judgment transferable: the reasoning a twenty-year veteran applies to a failing site can be captured, ranked and handed to a technician in their first month, which is how a team gets better faster than it grows.
That is what we are building at Popular Power. We want solar energy to become truly #Popular, and we want to be the best partner to the people making that happen every day.
