Michael La Marca Email & Phone Number

Phoenix, Az, Us

Houston, Texas Area

Phoenix, Arizona Area

In this role I use tools from data analysis and simulation to offer ways to optimize the performance of solar and wind power plants.

Phoenix, Arizona Area

I worked in development engineering to evaluate the energy production from potential solar PV sites from the small commercial to utility scale. During the evaluation process I would optimize project return by adjusting the site design in various ways. I also evaluated upcoming technologies for performance and reliability and developed our capacity test procedure and meteorological station packages.

Phoenix, Arizona Area & San Francisco

My responsibilities at Suntech revolved around evaluating module and site performance and included:- executing capacity & acceptance testing, implementing test protocol improvements, and running meetings to explain test findings to the site owner (customer) at the largest silicon solar installation in the US (223 MW DC)- projecting expected energy harvest of prospective sites given design considerations and meteorological conditions, as well as reviewing and commenting on the associated energy/performance guarantees and contractual obligations- determining legacy performance for existing sites, including panel degradation, soiling rate, and real-world temperature coefficient, and comparing actual energy production with PVSyst simulations using real world weather data- developing a of numerical optimization procedure for PVSyst PAN files in accordance with the results of laboratory testing of modules- programming Campbell Scientific datalogger at test installation to record all meteo and DC/AC sensor readings over both analog connections and digital communication networks (Modbus & TCP/IP), and the ability to both FTP this data for incorporation into a database and view it on an Android/ IPhone mobile device

As a research intern at Suntech Power, I determined project performance for PV sites ranging from 1-20 MW from meteorological and inverter data to ensure that contractual energy guarantees were achieved. This included the generation of performance reports for distribution to customers as well as to showcase module achievement for product marketing purposes.

At ASU I modeled the order/disorder interface of a Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin Layer (HIT) solar cell and completed extensive coursework in materials science and electrical engineering with a focus on the operation of and the physics underlying all types of solar cells.

San Jose, Ca

The mission of the Center for Advanced Research is to create competitive advantage by applying advanced technology and thinking to important practice problems. The Center brings to bear new ideas that have not traditionally been applied inside the accounting profession with a 23-person team of researchers, practitioners, and technologists with academic training and experience in a wide range of disciplines, including statistics, artificial intelligence, engineering, and system science. At the Center, I: Developed business intelligence analytics from accounting data using techniques in data mining and machine learning such as:- Using Weka to produce association and classification rules for prepayment discounts- Item description matching through stemming and Levenshtein edit distance- Implemented k-means clustering in MATLAB- Used separable (integer) programming to determine the optimal purchasing plan among a mix of vendors.- Consulted on vehicle routing and fuel purchase optimization using mixed integer programming for prospective client.

For my PhD research, I worked on a problem inspired by semiconductor factories involving the optimal way to introduce material into the production line to match a target output demand, given that the factory runs slower with more product in it. Using a hyperbolic PDE model, I developed a numerical optimization routine to solve this problem in the instance when inventory/backlog was not penalized, and then extended it to when inventory was penalized (please see reference to paper below)

Ph.D., Mathematics

B.S., Physics