HOMER International Microgrid Conference 2019: Meet Our Keynote Speakers

Maxine Ghavi

Maxine Ghavi is Group Senior Vice President and Head of Grid Edge Solutions Product Group at ABB. She has more than 25 years of experience holding various leadership roles in program and project management, business and market development, product management, business operations, and marketing and sales. Her experience spans the breath of the power industry including grid edge technologies, microgrids, storage, renewables, software and semiconductors.

She has held several key positions at ABB previously including Head of Market Development for Grid Edge Technologies, Program Director for Microgrids, Head of Solar Industry Segment Initiative. Prior to this, she was Head of Business Management at Oerlikon Solar, VP Sales at Voyan Technology and Sr. Product Manager at KLA-Tencor.

Maxine received her bachelor’s degree in physics from San Jose State University in California.

Jon Exel

Jon Exel is a Senior Energy Specialist at the World Bank Group. He leads the Global Facility on Mini Grids and manages the Energy Access for the Urban Poor initiative at the World Bank Group. He previously worked with the World Bank from 1998 to 2004 on renewable energy operations in Asia and Africa. Jon has also worked with private investors, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and started the first registered mini-hydropower development company under the new energy policy and regulations in Croatia. Jon has over two decades of experience in energy access and alternative energy sector, working with diesel, solar, hydropower, wind, and biomass-based energy systems, developing expertise in the delivery of energy services to large groups of end users; business plans and delivery models; pre-investment and investment plans; market intelligence; and how institutions plan and operate. Jon has lived and worked in Liberia, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Jerusalem, and Cambodia. Jon holds a MA in Energy Engineering and Business Administration.

Dr. Elaine Ulrich

Dr. Elaine Ulrich is a Senior Advisor for strategy in the solar office at the U.S. Department of Energy. She formerly led the balance of systems/soft costs team that works to reduce the non-hardware (soft costs) of solar and lower barriers to U.S. solar adoption. She recently served as a Senior Advisor for Energy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

A former American Physical Society/American Association for the Advancement of Science policy fellow, she has spent the past several years working on renewable energy. She previously held positions in the office of former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology, the Energy Department’s Office of Strategic Planning and Analysis, and in the office of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, where she worked to build a comprehensive solar energy portfolio.

She holds a B.A. in physics from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in optical science from the University of Arizona.

Dr. Daniel M. Kammen

Dr. Daniel M. Kammen is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair, the Goldman School of Public Policy where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), and was director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center from 2007 – 2015.

He was appointed by then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in April 2010 as the first energy fellow of the Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative. He began service as the Science Envoy for U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016, but resigned over President Trump’s policies in August, 2017. He has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities, including time at the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Energy, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell (BA 1984) and Harvard (MA 1986; PhD 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley.

Peter Asmus

Peter Asmus is Research Director for microgrids at Navigant Research focusing on emerging energy distribution, integration and optimization smart grid models such as nanogrids, microgrids and virtual power plants. Asmus has 30 years of experience in energy and environmental markets, as an analyst, writer, and consultant. His expertise also extends to renewables such as wind power, marine hydrokinetics and solar energy.

Asmus has been managing Navigant Research’s microgrid syndicated research service since 2009. In that role, he has served as the lead author of over 40 different reports covering topics as diverse as different microgrid global market segments (ranging from off-grid, remote communities to direct current (DC) data centers), capacity and revenue forecasts, technology evaluations and regulatory analysis. During the course of this research, he has also profiled over 100 market players active in this microgrid space.

Dr. Peter Lilienthal

Dr. Peter Lilienthal is the co-founder and CEO of HOMER Energy, a Boulder, CO based developer of software to model hybrid distributed energy systems.  Over 200,000 people in 190,000 countries use HOMER Energy products, and the company’s revenues have grown steadily since its founding in 2009. HOMER Energy’s clients include ABB, Caterpillar, Cummins, Inc, Rolls Royce, Tesla,  Leidos, Ameresco and other leaders in energy innovation,

Dr. Lilienthal is recognized as a world authority on microgrids, and serves as a consultant on distributed energy projects for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the International Development Bank, dozens of national and local governments, research institutions, utilities and universities. He is a frequent speaker at international events, and lecturer at many universities.

As the Senior Economist with International Programs at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory from 1990 to 2007, Dr. Lilienthal was one of the creators of NREL’s Village Power Programs, and served as its lead analyst. He has been the developer of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s HOMER^® hybrid power optimization software since 1993. In 2009 he founded HOMER Energy as NREL’s sole world-wide commercialization licensee to distribute and enhance the HOMER model.
Dr. Lilienthal has a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering  and Economic Systems from Stanford University as well as an M.S. in Resource Economics from the University of Vermont. He has been active in the field of renewable energy and energy efficiency since1978. 

Petra Píclová

Petra Píclová is the Renewable Energy Segment Manager at ComAp. She has been working for the company since 2011 and has led the Renewable Energy Division in ComAp since 2016. The prime focus of the Renewable Energy Division is development and installation of control systems for hybrid microgrids. She also established the Renewable Energy division in Australia in Dec 2017 which focuses on the delivery of smart control solutions for various types of microgrids installations.

Petra Píclová has a MSc.degree in Electrical Engineering (Power Systems), and later did research into optimization of energy management systems at the National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan and Brunel University in London as a part of her further development.

Join us at the Virtual 8th Annual HOMER International Microgrid Conference, October 12-16, 2020.

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