Our Team

Pacific Energy Institute has selected a group of non-resident Fellows comprised of accomplished practitioners and researchers who can add the most value, rather than selection by organizational affiliation, in order to advance our mission globally.

Fellows

Mark Paterson

Mark Paterson

Mark Paterson is Chief Strategy Officer and Managing Director of the Strategen Australia / Pacific practice based in Australia. Mark is an influential thought-leader in whole-system grid transformation and has played an integral role in Australia as it navigates to become one of the world’s most deeply decentralized electricity systems. Most recently, Mark served as General Manager of the Consumer Energy division at Horizon Power, a Western Australia utility. Earlier, he led the Electricity Grids & Renewable Energy Integration team at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. Mark is a member of the Clean Energy Council’s Distributed Energy Leadership Forum. He holds a Master of Enterprise from the University of Melbourne and undergrad qualifications in Business and Engineering.

John Caldwell

John Caldwell

Dr. John Caldwell is the former Director, Business Economics for Edison Electric Institute. John is an expert on development of long‐term forecast models for energy use and peak demand, alternative rate designs, such as negotiated rate, fixed price, and fixed bill products, and the implementation of financial hedging strategies and risk management systems to support these products. Earlier he worked at Illinois Power and NiSource. John has delivered papers at industry and academic conferences on price and income elasticity in the electricity sector, and the proper methodology for estimating the costs and benefits of grid technologies. John holds a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign‐Urbana, an MBA from the University of Illinois at Springfield, an MS in mathematics from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ken Fong

Ken Fong

Ken Fong is an independent consultant and the former Director of T&D Planning at Hawaiian Electric. His extensive planning and development background includes advanced strategic planning and development in the areas of integrated grid planning, transmission and distribution planning, resource planning, renewable energy integration, and generation technologies. Ken earlier was a Sr. Project engineer at the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research and supervising engineer at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. He holds a BS, Mechanical Engineering with Distinction, University of Hawaii. Ken is a professional engineer.

Samir Succar

Samir Succar

Dr. Samir Succar leads ICF’s DER analytics group focused on long-term planning and energy market modeling. His work on distribution system planning has focused on the impacts of DERs on the distribution system and the quantification and valuation of the net locational benefits of those resources. His work also extends into the economics of increasing hosting capacity across a utility service territory to augment the amount DER that the system can accommodate. Samir’s work also includes distribution system operations and systems that can facilitate optimization and coordinated dispatch of DERs to enable their provision of grid support services and market functions across multiple timescales. Samir holds a BS in Physics from Oberlin College, a MSE, Electrical Engineering and Ph.D., Energy Systems Analysis from Princeton University.

Fritz Kahrl

Fritz Kahrl

Dr. Fredrich (Fritz) Kahrl is an independent researcher and consultant. His expertise covers wholesale energy market design and regulation, electricity resource planning, transmission tariff design, retail tariff design, distributed energy resources, cost-effectiveness assessment, energy system modeling, greenhouse gas accounting, cap-and-trade systems, and air quality regulation. Fritz has worked with policymakers, regulators, utilities, developers, non-profit organizations, and researchers in North America and Asia. He is a senior advisor to the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) and a scholar at the Berkeley-Tsinghua Joint Research Center. He holds Ph.D. and MS degrees in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Philosophy from the College of William & Mary.

Kristen Brown

Kristen Brown

Dr. Kristen Brown is Head of Market Design at Electron in London. Electron is an entech firm, creating a digital infrastructure to enable new distributed markets for energy and flexibility. Kristen was previously Principal of Technology Innovation at Exelon Utilities. She’s been involved in the IEEE Blockchain Working Group, DOE i-Corps Industry Mentoring, and IT/Cyber Security internal standards development. Kristen was a Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, where she identified new opportunities to reduce the long-term and high-risk technological barriers in the development of transformative energy technologies. She has experience sourcing and evaluating technologies across diverse sectors, including power generation, chemical storage, and energy efficiency. Kristen received her PhD in Chemistry from Northwestern University where she was awarded the Northwestern Presidential Fellowship, the top award given to NU graduate students. She has a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Eric Ackerman

Eric Ackerman

Eric Ackerman is the former chief strategist at the Edison Electric Institute for retail energy delivery, providing national leadership on issues involving adaptive business strategy and alternative regulation. He is an expert on business and regulatory policy issues associated with grid modernization, the growth of distributed energy at scale, and the changing role of utilities in the market. Eric has focused on key issues related rate reform, new market rules, regulatory models that allow increased pricing flexibility, new resource planning and next-generation performance based regulatory incentives. He began his energy career as managing editor of Energy Digest, a Washington-based trade newsletter covering developments involving energy R&D, and energy policy. Eric holds a BA from Tufts University and an MBA from George Washington University.

Jeffrey Taft

Jeffrey Taft

Dr. Jeffrey Taft is the Chief Architect for Electric Grid Transformation at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. As a member of the Energy and Environment Directorate, he is responsible for development and articulation of large-scale architecture for grid modernization, as well as support of many cross-cutting activities at the Laboratory, including the Future Power Grid Initiative, advanced computing, and the Control of Complex Systems Initiative. He began working in the grid modernization area in 2001 and has held smart grid chief architect roles with Cisco, Accenture, and IBM. Jeff formerly worked for Westinghouse and has participated in several key smart grid projects since he first began to develop sensor architectures and analytics for distribution grids, and then became involved in the larger issues of end-to-end grid integration and control. Jeff earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh with a dual specialization in digital signal processing and digital control systems in 1986. He is a member of the IEEE Power and Energy Society, is an emeritus member of the GridWise Architecture Council and is the holder of 27 patents in control systems, signal processing, and grid modernization.

Debra Lew

Debra Lew

Dr. Debra Lew is the founder of Debra Lew LLC. She was a Senior Technical Director at GE Energy Consulting, where she has worked since 2015, focusing on utility integration of wind, solar and distributed energy resources. Previously, she worked 16 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where she initiated and led the Western Wind and Solar Integration Study which examined impacts of high penetrations of wind and solar in the Western Interconnection. In 2009-2010, she was seconded to the Hawaiian Electric Company to work on integrating high levels of wind and solar in Hawaii. She is the Chair of the International Institute of Electrical Engineers Power and Energy Society’s Wind and Solar Power Coordinating Committee and Chair of the Distributed Energy Working Group for the Energy Systems Integration Group. She has a BS in EE and Physics from MIT and a PhD from Stanford in Applied Physics.

Executive Director & Staff

Paul De Martini
Executive Director

Paul De Martini

Paul De Martini is a leading expert on the business, policy and technology dimensions of a more distributed power system. His extensive writings and consulting work have influenced industry transformation efforts in Australia, Canada, and across the US. Paul was previously the Chief Technology & Strategy Officer, Energy Internet of Things at Cisco Systems and Vice President, Advanced Technology at Southern California Edison. Paul earlier led North American market development for two of the largest competitive integrated energy services firms. Currently, he is a visiting scholar at Caltech and adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. Paul was the 2016 Cazier Practitioner-in-Residence at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a Fellow at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania. He holds an MBA from the University of Southern California, BS, Applied Economics from the University of San Francisco, and Certificate in Technology Management from Caltech.

Brittany Blair

Brittany Blair

Brittany Blair is a senior research analyst intern. She is currently a student in the MS, Energy Systems Management Program at the University of San Francisco. Brittany completed a combined Bachelor’s & Master’s program in Biotechnology at the University of Nevada and worked in a biochemistry laboratory focused on converting cacti into biofuel. Initially, Brittany wanted to work in the renewable energy industry as a biofuels research scientist but decided to attend the to gain more knowledge about the energy industry and how to help states like Nevada accelerate their own energy transition to renewable, sustainable, and clean technologies.

Andrew De Martini

Andrew De Martini

Andrew De Martini is a research analyst and technical writer with extensive experience producing and editing client project deliverables and publication of white papers. He has supported development of US DOE’s Modern Grid Report (DSPx), Caltech’s Grid 2020 report, California’s More Than Smart report, several Edison Electric Institute papers as well as other national lab reports. Andrew studied Philosophy and History at Boston University.

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