Building a new playbook for the CA solar industry

Cameron is the Executive Director of Think Microgrid, a membership coalition that represents the microgrid industry in critical policy, legislative and regulatory discussions at the federal and state level across the country. Cameron Brooks is also the President of E9 Insight, an advisory firm focused on the US utility industry and the policy landscape surrounding it. E9’s clients include a wide range of technology companies, advocacy coalitions and government agencies, including Department of Energy and national labs. Cameron has deep experience in regulatory engagement, business development and policy strategy, including a strong focus on distributed energy technologies and open market design. Cameron has served in executive roles with multiple clean energy companies and non-profits. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Cameron holds a B.A. from Yale University and an MBA from Cornell.

Frank Chen is cofounder & CTO at Balto Energy, a startup accelerating solar and battery adoption with AI, data, and financing. He’s a first-principles maker who creates compounding leverage across teams, products, and strategy. Outside the day-to-day, he’s into hiking, woodworking, and tinkering with ideas that spark meaningful change. Frank has a background in behavior design, engineering leadership, systems reliability engineering, and resiliency research. At Slack, Frank focused on making engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, leading special projects in the Developer Infrastructure department. At Palantir, Frank worked with customers in healthcare, finance, government, energy and consumer packaged goods to solve their hardest problems by transforming how they use data. At Amazon, Frank led a front-end team and infrastructure team to launch AWS WorkDocs, the first secure multi-platform service of its kind for enterprise customers. At Sandia National Labs, Frank researched resiliency and complexity analysis tooling with the Grid Resiliency group. He received a M.S. in Computer Science focused in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford. Frank's thesis studied how the design / psychology of exergaming interventions might produce efficacious health outcomes. With the Stanford Prevention Research Center, Frank developed health interventions rooted in behavioral theory to create new behaviors through mobile phones. He prototyped early builds of Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg and worked in the Persuasive Technology Lab. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA. Frank researched networked systems and image processing with the Center for embedded Networked Systems. With the Rand Corporation, he built research systems to support group decision-making.

Thomas Familia is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment at Arizona State University and a Designer-in-Residence at the UC San Diego Design Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Washington State University and brings over a decade of experience in electricity forecasting, utility planning, and regulation, including oversight of residential demand response pilots at the Oregon Public Utility Commission.

As data centers and other energy-intensive industries drive growing electricity demand, households offer a largely untapped source of grid flexibility through residential batteries, rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and other technologies. But having these resources available is not the same as having capacity the grid can depend on. Building on advances in technology and financial incentives, his work with Agile Electrification explores whether treating households as partners in creating grid capacity, rather than simply as providers of demand response, can further unlock this potential. In particular, he examines whether giving households a greater say in how their resources are used, stronger protections for their needs, and a meaningful stake in how the resulting benefits are shared can encourage greater and more sustained contributions to the grid.

Carl is a seasoned product & innovation strategy leader with 20+ years of experience in the solar, battery, and distributed energy resource (DER) space across the residential, C&I and utility-scale segments. As a hands-on, customer focused, adaptable, technically savvy and analytically oriented problem solver, Carl offers deep expertise in solar, battery storage, EVs, and other distributed energy resources - spanning technology, policy, markets and strategy.

Carl has a strong track record of delivering innovative software, hardware, and IoT enabled products and services to market that is built on core competencies of managing teams, persuading stakeholders, forging partnerships, and developing data informed product portfolio strategies. He’s delivered value in many business contexts ranging from a three person consulting firm; a startup scaling from 50 to 300; a midsize global company; and a top 5 multinational energy major with over 100,000 employees.