The speaker, Ankur Podder, was born and raised in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands of India and moved to the US back in 2017 for grad school at MIT. Ankur's motivation has been to serve vulnerable and marginalized communities facing challenges with housing crises and energy burdens. His experience growing up on remote islands motivated him to continue working with diversity, equity, and inclusion at the core of all his projects. His research work at MIT focused on the self-reliant development of island communities such as Puerto Rico and Maine's islands to achieve low embodied carbon and zero operational emissions with their affordable housing projects. Ankur spent three years with the Buildings Research Group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), focused on deploying affordable, net-zero energy buildings at scale. Most of these projects were funded by the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The HUD-funded project was specifically designed to add resilience to new and existing buildings for low-income communities. Ankur also led an education and workforce development project at NREL, funded by the US Advanced Manufacturing Office, that primarily focused on developing career maps and resources for underserved communities with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The content of this session brings to the forefront the need to reduce the cost of solar-plus-storage systems to make such technologies accessible to underserved communities. The high upfront costs continue to place a major energy burden on tenants or homeowners. Compared to middle- and upper-income households that spend 5% or less of their total household income on energy purchases, low-income households spend 10% or more of their income on energy expenses. “Low-income individuals typically are less likely to participate in clean distributed energy resources (DERs) due to critical barriers such as lack of access to capital, lower credit scores, and lower rates of homeownership. Unless these gaps are addressed, the transition to clean energy resources could widen the energy burden gap between high- and low-income households…” as noted in the report "Encouraging the Development of Distributed Energy Resources in Texas." Reframe Systems is on a mission to build inspiring, net-zero-carbon homes for all, at massive scale. This can only be achieved by lowering the project costs through the entire value chain of deploying solar-plus-storage systems for both single-family and multifamily housing.