EPIC Forum: Powering Resilient Communities Through Advanced Energy Technologies

Michael Colvin is the Director of Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, California Energy Program at Environmental Defense Fund. Based out of EDF’s San Francisco office, Michael focuses on building decarbonization, gas utility business models, wholesale electricity markets and transportation electrification matters. Across each of these issues, Michael’s focuses on minimizing investment risk and aligning utility incentives with affordable, clean and safe energy services.

Fassil Fenikile served as a telecommunications advisor to the CPUC for eight years and prior to that served the CPUC in various roles as a Utilities Engineer in the telecommunications and water industries. Prior to his current appointment, Fassil co-led a team of experts from AT&T and other carriers that collaborated with CPUC and CalFire in the creation of CPUC’s wild fire threat maps and fire safety regulations, the development of CPUC’s de-energization (Public Safety Power Shut-off) policies, and the development and implementation of dozens of safety regulations applicable to communications and electric utilities.

James “Jamie” Fine works to reduce the impacts of energy systems used to power buildings, transport and service people, and produce and move goods. His areas of research and advocacy include design and implementation of market-based policy, modeling the economic, air quality, and health consequences of policy decisions, deploying smart grid for environmental and electricity customer benefits, and facilitating the meaningful involvement of community stakeholders in environmental planning.

Jana Ganion is the Sustainability and Government Affairs Director for the Blue Lake Rancheria. Jana has established the Tribe’s strategy for zero-carbon resilience. Her development experience includes low-carbon community-scale and facility-scale microgrids, electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure, strategic planning in sustainability, climate action (mitigation and adaptation), emergency preparedness, and economic enterprise development.

Audrey Lee, Ph.D. Vice President, Energy Services Audrey deploys and aggregates home solar, batteries, and other energy services to serve residential customers, utilities, and grid operators in creating a more affordable, clean, reliable electricity grid. She leads Grid Services, Advanced Product, and Data Science teams at Sunrun. Previously, she built the analytics and operations platform at Advanced Microgrid Solutions to optimize a 50 MW fleet of customer-sited batteries as a virtual power plant in Southern California.

Clifford Rechtschaffen was appointed to the California Public Utilities Commission by Governor Jerry Brown in January 2017. At the CPUC his key areas of interest include decarbonization, safety, environmental justice, and enforcement. Commissioner Rechtschaffen is the assigned Commissioner on several risk assessment, emergency management and safety proceedings, the transportation electrification proceedings, Renewables Portfolio Standard, the affordability proceeding, and the biomethane and renewable gas proceedings. He also co-leads several internal agency initiatives, including implementation of the Commission's Environmental and Social Justice Action Plan, the development of a more uniform and formal CPUC enforcement policy, and efforts to make CPUC proceedings more streamlined and accessible to the public. Commissioner Rechtschaffen serves as one of two Commissioners on the Senate Bill 350 Disadvantaged Communities Advisory Group, is a member of the Western Energy Imbalance Market Body of State Regulators, and is on advisory board of the California Stationary Fuel Cell Collaborative and the Financial Research Institute.

Prior to joining the CPUC, Commissioner Rechtschaffen served as a senior advisor to Governor Brown from 2011 to 2017, where he worked on climate, energy, and environmental issues. In 2011 he also served as acting director of the California Department of Conservation. Commissioner Rechtschaffen served as a special assistant attorney general in the California Attorney General's Office from 2007 to 2010. From 1993 to 2007, he taught environmental law, directed the environmental law program, and co-founded the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Golden Gate University School of Law. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on environmental law and policy. He was a deputy attorney general in the Environment Section of the California Attorney General's Office from 1986 to 1993, a Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellow at the Marin County Legal Aid Foundation from 1985 to 1986, and a law clerk for the Honorable Thelton Henderson, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, from 1984 to 1985. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and Princeton University. He lives in Oakland and is a diehard Golden State Warriors fan.

Dr. Adam Rose is a Research Professor in the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy and a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE). Professor Rose’s primary research interest is the economics of disasters. He has spearheaded the development of CREATE’s comprehensive economic consequence analysis framework and has done pioneering research on resilience at the level of the individual business, industry and national economy. He is currently the PI of a contract from the Critical infrastructure Institute to measure the cost-effectiveness of static economic resilience tactics as the basis for the development of a Business Resilience Calculator decision-support software tool. Professor Rose’s other major research area is the economics of energy and climate change policy

JP Ross has been actively engaged with solar market development and commercialization since 1999. After completing a master’s degree in Energy and Resources from the University of California at Berkeley, JP joined Greenpeace to advocate for wind and solar as an alternative to 50GW of new gas plants in response to the California Energy crisis. JP then moved to Vote Solar, and successfully campaigned for California’s Million Solar Roofs helping make solar energy the most cost-effective source of energy. JP lead Vote Solar’s activities in pro-solar rate design regulatory proceedings across the US. JP is now the Senior Director of Local Development, Electrification and Innovation at East Bay Community Energy, a CCA serving electricity to 1.5M people in Alameda County.

Vice Chair Janea A. Scott is serving in her second term on the California Energy Commission. She was appointed Vice Chair in 2019. Scott is one of five commissioners on the Energy Commission, which is the state's primary energy policy and planning agency. Scott is the lead commissioner for the Energy Commission’s research and development portfolio, which includes the Electric Program Investment Charge program, the Natural Gas Research Program, and the Food Production Investment Program. Vice Chair Scott is managing the CPUC’s rulemaking on microgrids and resiliency as it is directly related to the event.

Genevieve Shiroma was appointed to the CPUC by Governor Newsom on Jan. 22, 2019. Prior to joining the CPUC, Commissioner Shiroma served as a member of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board since 1999, serving as chair since 2017 and from 2011 to 2014 and 1999 to 2006. Previously, she was Chief of the Air Quality Branch at the California Air Resources Board from 1990 to 1999 and as an air quality engineer from 1978 to 1990. From 1999 to 2018, Commissioner Shiroma was the elected director of Ward 4 of the Sacramento Utility Municipal District (SMUD). Commissioner Shiroma resides in Sacramento, and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering from University of California, Davis. She was born and raised as a farm worker's daughter in the Acampo-Lodi area of San Joaquin County.

Tom Tansy is Chairman of the SunSpec Alliance where he leads the distributed energy industry's efforts to establish data and communication standards that enable seamless integration of solar PV and storage into the Smart Grid. The SunSpec Alliance has more than 100 stakeholders across the globe, including leading fleet operators, component suppliers, software developers, financiers, and utilities. SunSpec’s areas of focus include grid integration, finance data interchange, O&M data interchange, and cybersecurity.

Susan Wilhelm is the team lead for energy-related environmental research at the California Energy Commission (CEC). Her team plans and manages a large portfolio of energy-related environmental research, including development of high-resolution climate projections, investigation of climate-related vulnerabilities to the energy system, and research related to methane emissions from the natural gas system. In addition, Susan’s team manages risks posed by the energy system to ecosystems and public health as well as terrestrial and water resources.