A group of seasoned energy professionals have come together around the shared mission of enabling the development of community microgrids and other DERs at scale throughout the state. Spark Communities team members are leveraging diverse perspectives, expertise, and networks to overcome regulatory, financial, and technical challenges to move California communities toward a sustainable, resilient, and equitable energy future. Despite these challenges, we’ve identified 3 promising strategies that navigate around existing regulatory obstacles to enable the development of FOM community DERs at scale now - well ahead of the 20 to 30 years widely regarded as the baseline timeframe.Spark Community MIcrogrids is a transformative approach to multi-property microgrid development that utilizes a targeted, city-franchised, municipal power utility with a service area that includes only those customers served by the microgrid. The Spark Community Utilities strategy, is a California adaptation of Ann Arbor’s Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) — an opt-in municipal utility that operates alongside the local investor-owned utility. Our Spark Community MHP initiative works with master-metered mobile home park operators to upgrade their private distribution grid with solar panels, batteries, and power control systems to significantly reduce power costs and provide a number of other advantages to the operators, residents, the municipality, and the local economy.Each of these disruptive policy strategies bypass traditional obstacles such as negotiations with IOUs over the value of existing infrastructure, over-the-fence restrictions, skewed CPUC regulatory oversight, interconnection queue delays, and the need for legislative or ballot campaigns.

Today’s challenges can be tomorrow’s opportunities. With over 30 years of experience as a technologist and entrepreneur, I collaborate with technology companies and mission-driven organizations to help them think creatively about addressing current challenges in ways that create long-term value. I’m pursuing opportunities in renewable/distributed energy, 3D modeling and fabrication, mobile applications, home automation and database development. I work with clients to analyze requirements and design practical solutions that fit their long-term strategic objectives. I have a track record of helping organizations get on track, stay on track, and execute according to plan. I'm fluent in most all common design approaches, design patterns, and development environments. I participate as a process and data modeler, an architectural analyst, an active leader of development, and when called upon as a developer and debugger extraordinaire.

Introduced the first object database engine designed for use in mass-market consumer applications. NeoAccess enabled the development of hundreds of new applications which have resulted in over 250 million shipments/downloads that have contributed to revenues for customers in excess of $15 billion. Customers include AOL, Apple, Avid, CompuServe, Encyclopedia Britannica, IBM, Inktomi, Intuit, Microsoft, National Instruments, Netscape, Nikon, Xerox and more than a thousand other successful companies.NeoLogic pioneered the embedded desktop database. Innovations include;* User Friendly – no sys-admin, double-clickable single file databases* Responsive – focus from the ground up on quick screen updates* Small Footprint – tiny databases on disk, scalable in-memory cache, breath-taking performance on resource limited hardware* Cross-Platform – full support for all mass-market OS's* Developer Friendly – bullet-proof, 100% C++, cross-platform API, full relational search and sort functionality, often no runtime fees

Teaches technology & innovation privately and at San Francisco Bay Area schools, leads the Classroom 3D group on Thingiverse, produces the popular Tinkercad Tutorials channel on YouTube, edits the TinkerTeacher blog at tinkerteacher.blogspot.com, actively contributes to the OnShape and Tinkercad user communities, and supports STEAM programs, educators and professional 3D product designers through professional development workshops, advisory services, and other collaborations globally.Inventor Studios develops fun, supportive and challenging S.T.E.A.M. -focused learning environments for 3rd - 12th-grade students that instill a sense of wonder about how the world works and prepare them to reach for acceptance to first-choice colleges and then on to rewarding and impactful careers.Inventing Reality and Inventors Workshop pioneerd 3D modeling and robotics courses taught at top independent schools in the San Francisco East Bay and as a program option of summer enrichment programs. Inventing Reality introduces students to 3D object design, digital scanning and 3D printing. It is offered to 3rd through 12th grade students, and has been designed to serve as an appropriate introductory 3D modeling course for all students, and to prepare more serious art or engineering oriented students to further develop their skills using these revolutionary new technologies. Classroom activities include hands-on experience developing 3D designs on the computer, capturing the world through 360° scanning of existing objects, and using 3D printers to fabricate objects in plastic, wood, metal, and other materials.

At the time of launch, the financial benefits of residential PV in the areas of Northern California serviced by Pacific Gas & Electric were compelling, with lifetime internal rates of return commonly above 10%. But the industry had to recruit beyond the pool of highly-motivated early adopters they'd traditionally relied upon to sustain annual sales growth rates of 50%. East Bay Solar Neighborhoods was a non-profit community organization founded to educate homeowners about the practical and financial benefits of residential solar. Working with municipalities and neighborhood solar champions, we offered information, financial tools and the sense of community that helped jumpstart the next tier of solar adoption. The set of community resources offered by EBSN included;* A high-fidelity financial model that provided homeowners with side-by-side lifetime comparisons of as many as three quotes from solar installers. The rich set of inputs accepted by the model include a homeowner's historical energy use, all available financing options, and time-of-use vs tier utility rate plans. Model outputs for each quote included projected energy usage and production, lifetime cost/benefit, financing costs and incentive benefits, and internal rates of return.* A 45-minute solar tutorial presentation that introduced homeowners to the practical and financial aspects of exploring solar for their home.* A highly successful "neighborhood solar champion" program that helped neighborhood leaders guide people in their social network through the process of going solar.* A 30-page self-paced solar tutorial on the EBSN website. (www.ebsn.org)* A web-based discussion forum.* A deep network of relationships with municipal leaders, solar installers, and solar financiers interested in the continued growth of residential solar.

Member of a team of experienced entrepreneurs and utility/residential energy veterans exploring potential opportunities enabled by the emergence of Home Area Networks (HAN) and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). After brainstorming various opportunities, the focus turned toward low-cost, wirelessly-enabled, thin-client information displays with minimal interactivity. Users would use a web browser running on a laptop or other device to choose from a selection of highly-personalized information channels that would be presented on the device. Possible channels would include weather, stocks, sports, shopping lists, energy use, art, calendar events and so on. Content would be laid out in the cloud and presented on the device. Device form factor would lend itself for use in unique contexts, such as on the refrigerator door, the bathroom mirror, a wall of the front door entryway, etc.The project came to a close once we understood the challenges and limits of the opportunity for our team.

As a leading systems integrator of rooftop and ground-mounted commercial photovoltaic power systems worldwide, accelerating or even sustaining SunPower’s 40% annual growth required that the processes used by the sales and system engineering groups be overhauled using the latest technologies to optimize information flow across functions and streamline proposal / contract generation and system design processes. I was responsible for formulating the architecture of a 3D project design extension to AutoCAD. This extremely fast-paced project included;* Collecting functional requirements from company’s sales, engineering and operations groups,* Evaluating previously selected software development tools (which were deemed unsuitable),* Identifying, designing and championing core architectural components of the system, to include; 2.5D geometry engine, project constraint engine, software configuration engine, and engine to support evolution of projects from proposals to operational systems,* Developing initial implementations of core software components.

Researched, evolved and solicited funding to launch a self-service mobile ordering startup. The objective was to enable retail product and service providers to increase per-store revenues, lower costs and improve consumer loyalty. This would be accomplished by deploying a pizza box –like “mobile transaction portal” connected to the peripheral chain of POS systems in retail locations. Consumers would purchase movie tickets, order coffee or buy gasoline using a key fob, mobile phone or other wireless device in communication with the wireless portal. I was unable to obtain funding and the venture was eventually abandoned. Tasks completed while pursuing this exciting opportunity included;* Write and extensively evolve detailed business plan and executive summary documents* Development of presentations targeting potential investors and partners* Development of prototype mobile application running on a Java-enabled phone with all major elements of the proposed user-experience* Creation of a storyboard of the complete user experience* Recruited a network of retail POS veterans as advisors* Pursued potential partnership relationships with Apple, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Starbucks, national theater chains, regional concert promoters and others* Pitched numerous potential investors including Redpoint, Trinity, Hummer Winblad and others* Hired and managed graphic designers, illustrators and icon designers to create all necessary graphic elements for investor collateral and prototype application* Designed and applied for patent on a custom mobile ordering key-fob device

Responsible for getting the development of a new point-to-multipoint wireless system’s software component off the ground. Accomplishments included;* Collected internal and external functional requirements,* Initiated and led the committee of RF, hardware, firmware and software engineers to develop a system architecture that had consensus support throughout the organization,* Fully-staffed a diverse, high-quality and close-knit development team of eight engineers during a time of intense competition for experienced talent, * Led the software team that evolved and executed the design in six months,* Bootstrapped the technology-base with significant constructs leveraged from earlier work with object databases,* Instituted a template software engineering process to support the company’s M&A activities.

Researched issues associated with the development of the networking portion of a real-time Unix kernel suitable for use in factory automation applications. Issues explored included the use of semaphores to manage concurrency, process scheduling, minimum latency requirements and API support.

Having developed and deployed the first virtual-memory operating system for IBM mainframes in the 1960’s, the advent of distributed computing caused the university's computing center to undertake a massive effort to decentralize computing resources on campus. Designed and implemented a new client application that allowed users of workstations to access mainframe files and computing resources. Workstation and micro operating systems worked on included Unix, Apollo Domain, Lisa and Macintosh.

Provided sole customer support and staff training on large Multics time-sharing systems for universities and multi-nationals in the U.S. and Europe. The Multics operating system was the precursor of Unix. It was the first commercial system to use virtual memory, a hierarchical file system, extensible command-line syntax, hardware enforced security and network communications processors. Some of the first servers on the Internet were Multics systems.