Kent Riley Email and Phone Number

After the sale of the Plains & Eastern project to NextEra Energy Resources, Clean Line began developing new wind, solar, and storage assets. I assist in the prospecting efforts for greenfield renewable and storage sites in addition to continuing the development of our existing transmission and wind projects. In my new role, I maintained the responsibilities I had as an associate and also began supervising several analysts at the company. I manage analysts by helping them prioritize and review their work product and by supporting their growth at Clean Line.

My responsibilities at Clean Line expanded to include more of the financial aspects of the transmission and renewable projects being developed at the company. I built and maintained the financial project models for all transmission and renewable projects being developed, as well as coordinated with the U.S. Department of Energy on the financial analysis of the Plains & Eastern Clean Line project, which ultimately resulted in the DOE's Record of Decision to participate in the development of the project. In addition, I continued conducting resource and market research and producing analytical material to assist regulatory and commercial efforts on all Clean Line projects. I managed external consultants through the creation of project-specific reports, including production cost analyses, wind resource assessments, and economic impact studies. I also created a software tool and UI to facilitate market analyses performed by colleagues resulting in significant time savings.

As a Quantitative Analyst, I was able to leverage my analytical skills I developed as a Ph.D. candidate in Physics to support the renewable development efforts at Clean Line. In this role, I conducted analyses to assist in the development of four HVDC (high-voltage direct current) and one AC (alternating current) transmission projects to enable more than 17 GW of wind power delivery from wind-rich resource areas (interior U.S.) to major demand centers to the east and west. I studied the U.S. electricity markets and conditions, wind resources and integration, effects of the Clean Line transmission projects on the current electricity grid and economic impacts, and emergent commercial opportunities and used this information to advance commercial development, regulatory permitting, company strategic planning, and public outreach goals.

I received my Ph.D. in Physics for completing and defending my dissertation “Searching for Local Parity Violation in Heavy Ion Collisions.” The research involved analyzing millions of heavy ion collisions for correlations that reflect a violation of a fundamental symmetry that is observed in local domains of QCD matter. To compare against the experimental data collected at the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, I simulated millions of collision events using Monte Carlo algorithms and investigated the specific properties of gold collisions. Furthermore, I developed analytical software for the Forward GEM Tracker detector to be implemented in the STAR experiment. As one of my responsibilities due to being a part of the STAR collaboration, I supervised a team of 3 detector operators at RHIC over several week-long shifts overseeing the data collection of gold ion collisions.

In addition to the research I conducted as a Ph.D. candidate, I was a teaching fellow during my tenure at Yale. In this role, I regularly instructed 50-70 students in intensive introductory level physics courses on topics including mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, and cosmology during weekly study sessions and graded their assignments. I also guided weekly 4-5 hour laboratory classes for 12 students in introductory level physics in 2009-2010.

I assisted professor Tetsuji Okada in his research of the crystallization of G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). My primary role was to design and conduct experiments to efficiently grow and cultivate these GPCR crystals made of bovine rhodopsin for structural mapping and performance analysis through X-ray crystallography and microspectrophotometry. In addition to my research role, I assisted several professors in the life sciences department with translating documents and websites from Japanese to English.