December 3, 2021
Alumni Panel
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Armando Casillas, Scientific Engineering Associate, LBNL
Armando has been a Scientific Engineering Associate at LBNL since 2019. He works in a number of projects related to building energy efficiency, grid-interactiveness and flexibility and HVAC fault detection and diagnostics. During his undergraduate years, Armando worked as an Energy Analyst at UC Merced Facilities Management for two years where he was exposed to highly automated building systems, including HVAC, and has also worked for the Energy Conservation Office at UC Davis performing continuous commissioning. His Masters work was conducted at the Western Cooling Efficiency Center, which involved wireless sensing for building leakage diagnostic applications. Armando holds a M.S in Energy Systems from UC Davis and a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from UC Merced.
John Cook, Principal Analyst, Salt River Project
Jon completed his PhD in Ag & Resource Economics at UC Davis in 2013 with a focus on energy and environmental economics and has worked in consulting, government, and a utility during his early career. After completing his PhD, Jon spent three years working as a consultant with Freeman, Sullivan and Co. (acquired by Nexant in 2014) in San Francisco/Washington, DC, where he specialized in designing and evaluating demand response, time-varying pricing and electric vehicle programs for utilities. From 2016-2019, Jon worked as an Economist at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) where he conducted empirical analysis of wholesale electricity markets and was a part of internal research efforts studying the impacts of past policy changes and areas for future policy development. Jon moved to Phoenix in the summer of 2019 and is currently a Principal Analyst in the Resource Analysis & Planning department at Salt River Project (SRP) specializing in probabilistic modeling and data visualization to support SRP’s long-term resource plans.
Madison Hoffacker, Strategic Analyst, PG&E
Madison joined PG&E in 2020 as a Strategic Analyst on the Microgrid Policy and Strategies team. Madison works to develop PG&E’s multi-customer microgrid tariff and program to enable community-driven microgrid projects, while also supporting with PG&E’s Remote Grid Initiative, which aims to reduce wildfire risk by removing long distribution segments serving remote, small loads. Madison graduated with a master’s from EGG in 2019. While a graduate student, she worked at CAISO as a summer intern on the Market & Infrastructure Policy team researching resource adequacy methodologies. Prior to graduate school, Madison was a research scientist for several years at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and at UC Davis. Her research on energy and land-use issues have led to several published papers that aim to help reduce environmental impacts of large-scale solar energy systems. Madison earned her B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from Chapman University.
