CEO Report Item 13
CEO Report Item 13
TO: Ava Community Energy Board of Directors
FROM: Nick Chaset, Chief Executive Officer
SUBJECT: CEO Report (Informational Item)
DATE: April 17, 2024
________________________________________________________________________ Recommendation
Accept Chief Executive Officer (CEO) report on update items below.
Executive Committee Meeting
The April 3, 2024 Executive Committee Meeting was canceled. The next Executive Committee meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 1, 2024 at 9 am.
New Employees
Forrest Csulak
Forrest joined Ava on March 19, 2024 as the Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) Associate.
He will be supporting Ava’s community programs by managing Ava’s distributed energy resources management system (DERMS) operations and Ava’s Solar and Battery Storage program.
Prior to joining Ava, Forrest amassed 5 years of experience assisting with utility-scale program design and working with virtual power plant companies including Olivine and KrakenFlex to optimize and operationalize DER control strategies around wholesale energy market participation, customer rate savings, carbon emissions reductions, and California’s ELRP.
Forrest has a B.S. in energy engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
Christina Cheuk
Christina joined Ava on 3/26/24 as in-house Designer on the Marketing team. Christina will assist with the design, direction, and production of Ava marketing and program materials.
Prior to Ava, Christina worked at Energy Solutions for 5 years, where she helped establish a design department. She managed the creative direction and development of ES's brand along with client visual identities and materials for energy efficiency, DER, and policy programs nationwide. Before that, she was the lead designer for Crossroads Trading, a sustainable fashion company.
CEO Report Item 13
Christina has a B.A. from UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology. She loves dogs, gardening, and cooking vegetarian food from around the world.
Gabriel Head
Gabriel joined Ava on March 19, 2024 as the CAISO Day Ahead Manager. He will be designing and executing the CAISO Day Ahead trading strategy for the Power Resources team and assessing and then optimizing the performance of Ava's storage and renewable assets in the CAISO Day Ahead and Real Time markets.
Prior to joining Ava, Gabriel led a team of 7 Data Scientists at Plus Power, a battery storage developer operating in ERCOT, to design, develop and deploy an AI-enabled automated trading platform capability in-house. Before that he was a Senior Data Scientist at Fluence Digital where he worked on the Mosaic trading platform for customers operating in the Australian NEM and ERCOT. He brings 13 years of experience working in energy systems modeling, quantitative energy finance, and algorithmic asset management in wholesale power markets. He has architected, implemented, and deployed time series forecasting and numerical optimization platforms to production cloud environments to support the execution of physical and financial trading strategies.
Gabriel holds a BScE in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania and completed graduate coursework in Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University before launching a predictive modeling startup out of the Rice Business Plan Competition.