Building a Resilient, Skilled & Diverse Solar Workforce

Will began working in the renewable energy industry in 2005 for a small East Coast integrator. After starting as an installer, he worked in sales, design, and project management, and he eventually became the Director of Operations for the East Coast. Will has experience in wind power, solar thermal, energy storage, and all scales of PV, although he has primarily focused on residential systems. He is passionate about implementing high-quality, code-compliant installation techniques. Will has been a NABCEP Certified PV Installation Professional since 2006 and was previously a NABCEP Certified Solar Heating Installer. After spending over five years developing curriculum and teaching for SEI, he has transitioned into the Director of Business Development role, where he helps organizations meet their training needs through customized contract training and curriculum licensing. In his free time, Will can be found working with his wife and daughter on their homestead in central Vermont, which features an off-grid strawbale house.

Andrew leads the Asset Management team at Nextracker, responsible for fleet performance and customer success across the global operating fleet of >60 GW. Andrew’s team is responsible for commissioning, performance, technical support, warranty, spare parts, and customer training, as well as deployment & optimization of the TrueCapture™ yield enhancement software solution. Andrew has over 20 years of experience in the renewable energy space, building & leading asset management and operations teams at Radian Generation, Canadian Solar, and Recurrent Energy. Andrew holds a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics and a BS Honors Physics from the University of Bristol, U.K.

As Silicon Ranch’s Chief Technology Officer, Nick is charged with identifying and leveraging emerging technologies that enable Silicon Ranch to support the US domestic supply chain and demonstrate the sequestration of carbon. Nick has more than 20 years of diverse renewable energy, semiconductor, and military experience that inform his current work, including executive positions at SolarCity, Phoenix Solar, and Applied Materials. Nick’s renewable energy industry expertise spans module and cell manufacturing, photovoltaic project design and operation, auxiliary grid services, as well as the prediction and demonstration of the energy harvest of novel PV technologies. He has also worked on manufacturing amorphous silicon modules, and on process machine control of cell splitting and cascading cell bonding processes with heterojunction crystalline cells. Silicon Ranch owns projects that Nick himself designed nearly a decade ago, including the first transmission interconnected PV plant in the Southeast. Nick holds patents in both PV module manufacturing and design. While at Applied Materials, he advanced the use of statistical process control to enhance the reliability of production equipment. He has led the commissioning of process equipment at Intel semiconductor factories in both the U.S. and Europe, and entire solar cell factories in India, Germany, Spain, and China. Nick served his country on active duty as an Infantry Captain in the United States Army, with tours in Kuwait and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nick is currently leading Silicon Ranch’s efforts to develop Cattle Tracker, working with the DOE, leading universities, and regenerative ranchers; Cattle Tracker is Silicon Ranch’s Integrated PV System Design and Management Platform for the co-optimization of cattle-grazing and PV solar generation while measuring the impacts of these efforts on the surrounding ecosystem dynamics and soil health.

Arthur Bart-Williams is the Executive Director of the Bay Area affiliate of GRID Alternatives whose mission is to build community-powered solutions to advance economic and environmental justice through renewable energy. GRID works to simultaneously help slow global warming, create jobs, and alleviate poverty through no cost installations for renewable energy solutions and workforce development in underserved communities. Arthur has an extensive career that includes construction management, program/project/product management, and entrepreneurship in several industries including infrastructure, education, transportation, energy, health, government, and hospitality. He excels at building high-performance teams focusing efforts on exceptional customer relationships with high-quality service and has been responsible for fundraising, business development, and implementation. With a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, Arthur is excited to bring his experience, skills, and passion for innovation to challenging opportunities. He is a Bay Area resident with his wife and their three daughters.

Diversity and inclusion champion, culture strategist, change agent, leadership coach, professor and subject matter expert are just a few of the words used to describe Professor Tandalea Mercer. Armed with 25 years of progressive corporate experience, Ms. Mercer was born in Brooklyn, NY. Ms. Mercer began her corporate career in local government, with the City of New York in 1999. She went on to work in other areas of the City of NY, local government. She has held various corporate titles and has served at the pleasure of the U.S. Secretary of Labor, as an EEO Compliance Officer for the United States Department of Labor- Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. Over the course of time, in addition to working for the public sector at both the local and federal levels, Mercer worked in several other industries including: non-profit, private and in Higher Education, in several capacities within HR compliance, policy, diversity and inclusion and training. Additionally, Ms. Mercer has built her career within Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and has held senior level management positions. She is also an Adjunct Professor at California State University at Northridge, where she teaches African American/Black Politics and Diversity and Equity in Schools at the undergraduate level and she also teaches Best Practices in Diversity and Inclusion and Best Practices in HR at California State University- Los Angeles, for the Masters of Public Administration Program within Political Science Graduate Studies program.