Christopher Hinton Email & Phone Number

Camas, Wa, Us

Irvine, California, Us

Asset and portfolio management consulting for clean energy.

After 4 years of business building with Omnidian, I took 2022 off to finish an Executive MBA at Berkeley Haas, support my wife with her business, and spend time recharging with my family.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Joined early-stage startup as 6th employee to lead the company’s expansion into the C&I solar market. Supported the company’s growth from a $5M Seed Round through a Series B with a greater than $100M valuation and more than 130 employees. Now an investor.• Launched the initial commercial solar business and won customer #1: a Fortune 1000 REIT.• Designed, built, and maintained cost and price models for all C&I solar O&M services.• Analyzed failure risks, losses, and remediation times to design innovative performance guarantees.• Refined product-market fit, tailoring guarantees and services for small and large assets, direct and channel sales.

Seattle, Wa, Us

• Hired and led the initial commercial solar operations team and scaled processes to onboard over 300 assets.• Developed benchmarking analysis of maintenance scopes, labor and time allocations, and dispatch strategies.• Supported negotiations for O&M contracts to build a nationwide network of local and regional O&M partners.

San Diego, Ca, Us

Led the Solar Asset Management team (3 direct reports) and cross-functional teams to optimize the performance and returns from Sempra’s $3B, 1.5GW utility-scale solar portfolio.• Led spotless compliance with all debt and tax-equity financing agreements, joint-ventures, PPAs, OMAs, federal grants and a DOE loan, and fostered relationships with equity partners, lenders, customers, and vendors.• Advised M&A and commercial teams on risks identified during due diligence of potential acquisitions.• Leveraged operational experience to sharpen project finance models and inform capex vs opex design decisions.• Redesigned the chart of accounts by partnering with Accounting and O&M teams to build consistent financial planning & analysis across solar portfolios, improving transparency and unlocking cost reductions.• Reconciled asset performance against budgets and proforma models, analyzed variances, refined forecasts.

San Diego, Ca, Us

• Executed over $500M in construction loan draws with lenders and JV partners to build 315 MW of solar.• Partnered with Engineering and Operations teams to increase peak solar capacity, mitigate performance deficiencies, and optimize portfolio production.• Built automated tools with Excel VBA to analyze CAISO settlement data, gain visibility into transmission congestion costs, and evaluate the performance of congestion hedges.

Orange, Connecticut, Us

Developed expert Excel and VBA modeling and contract management skills supporting the optimization of the Klamath Cogen Project before progressing to solar and wind asset management with full P&L responsibility.• Optimized the financial performance of five wind farms (515 MW) by managing PPAs, advising on maintenance and repair strategies, administering warranty and insurance claims, and developing dashboards and reports.• Managed company’s first two utility-scale solar projects (50 MW) from NTP through first years of operation.• Delivered $6M annual EBITDA from a 55 MW paper mill biomass power project by stewarding transmission, balancing authority, and power purchase and sale agreements and relationships in the Pacific NW and CA.• Negotiated amendments to power purchase agreements to reduce financial risks and settlement complexity.• Led stakeholder engagement and achieved consensus with WREGIS and PPA customers for a new method to reconcile RECs with fossil fuel use in biomass power plants by incorporating boiler fuel flow data.

Orange, Connecticut, Us

• Designed and built (with VBA, SQL and SCADA data) an economic dispatch model system for a 540 MW combined cycle plant to calculate real-time weather-adjusted plant capabilities and marginal dispatch economics to guide and coordinate power and gas traders, unlocking unsold capacity and adding $10M+ to annual earnings.• Modeled contracts and automated invoices with Excel VBA to settle complex power tolling and steam offtake agreements, improving billing transparency, reducing errors, and lowering overhead expense.

Master Of Business Administration - Mba For Executives

Graduate Certificate, Applied Energy Economics And Policy

Bachelor Of Science, Energy Studies

Education record