Episode Summary:
In this episode, Sharon Lee talks with Alex Snedeker about her recent trip around the world, her background, and what she brought from this trip. Alex talks about her path to renewables and her experience in this field. They delve into solar monitoring and the current trends in solar energy, such as financial monitoring and integration, attending the RE+ Show event, and how Alex mentors young people in the renewable field.
Insights from this Episode:
- Alex’s trip around the world
- Alex’s background and how it influenced her path towards renewables
- Her experience in renewables
- Monitoring solar arrays
- Trends in monitoring
- Attending the RE+ Show
- Sharon Lee meeting Abby Hooper at the RE+ Show
- Alex’s insights into mentorship
- Sharon Lee’s next guest on the podcast (Kelly Pickerel, with Solar Power World)
- Alex signing up for improv classes
Quotes from the Show:
- “That’s what this podcast is about: strong women with passion, and determination. I love lifting up these incredible stories” —Sharon Lee in “The Sunnyside Podcast”
- “My path has had a lot of twists and turns, even though I knew I wanted to be in the environmental field, it’s very vast and there is a lot of different areas that you can play in (…) but I think connecting with people in the industry is really how it goes” —Alex Snedeker in “The Sunnyside Podcast”
- “That’s a testament to solar marketing: that it’s almost too effective because now everyone sees solar as so easy to maintain that you don’t have to monitor it” —Alex Snedeker in “The Sunnyside Podcast”
- “It (the RE+ Show) was definitely great to see people from outside the kind of companies and events that you would normally go to, and see really a broader spectrum and cross-section of renewables industry” —Alex Snedeker in “The Sunnyside Podcast”
- “Some of the hardest things to figure out when you are on the outside and you don’t have a lot of work experience, there is a lot of breadth and depth to the energy industry” —Alex Snedeker in “The Sunnyside Podcast”
[/av_textblock]
[av_textblock textblock_styling_align=” textblock_styling=” textblock_styling_gap=” textblock_styling_mobile=” size=” av-desktop-font-size=” av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” font_color=” color=” id=” custom_class=” template_class=” av_uid=’av-l4r1tfwl’ sc_version=’1.0′ admin_preview_bg=”]
Episode transcript:
Sharon Lee:
Welcome to The Sunnyside, the podcast that makes solar energy relatable, accessible and attainable. Join us as we journey behind the scenes with women taking amazing strides in all parts of the solar industry. I’m your host, Sharon Lee, and thank you for joining us today.
Welcome to another episode of The Sunnyside. I’m Sharon and I am so excited about this upcoming guest. I have Alex Snedeker, and she is a principal with Wattch, which is a monitoring platform, with me. Normally, I go through a section on Sharon’s Corner what I’ve been up to since the last episode, but several of the things I’ve been up to Alex has too. So I think it makes sense for me to just dive right into this episode and bring Alex into the conversation.
So we were out in Anaheim, California for RE+, which is the largest solar show of the year. This show hasn’t been together since I think 2019. So for this group to get back together, the energy was, no pun intended, was just phenomenal. So that was really exciting. So Alex and I were out there together. Then she left straight from there to go to the other end of the world on a fantastic two week trip. So I’m going to bring Alex into the conversation so she can say hello and tell us a little bit about why in the world she chose to do that and how the trip was. Hey, Alex.
Alex Snedeker:
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Sharon Lee:
You are very welcome. Excited to hear about your trip. Welcome back.
Alex Snedeker:
Before I talk about my trip, I feel like it’s worth giving some context about my background. So I used to live in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was there from 2016 to 2020 and hadn’t really had the opportunity to go back since the pandemic. In that time, I’ve had a lot of friends who have gotten married, had kids, moved to different homes. So I wanted to have the chance to go and catch up with them. So like you said, yeah, I visited for two weeks and I made a couple of stopovers in South Korea and the Philippines.
I ate banana leaf and hot pot. I checked out some of the new speakeasies in Chinatown. Of course, I went to my favorite salon to get a two hour massage. So it was fun, it was luxurious, it was full of social interaction. But I am honestly just happy to be back, be off of planes and be settled in Atlanta and back on the renewable energy grind again.
Sharon Lee:
All right. Well, we are happy to have you back in Atlanta. So let’s dive into your background a little bit more about what even put you on the path of renewables.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah, it’s definitely a circuitous route, full of a lot of twists and turns. So I was originally a UNC environmental science major, shout out Tar Heels. After college ended up joining the Venture for America Program, which is a two year fellowship that places recent grads in startups and small businesses in emerging cities. So I was originally placed in a real estate developer in New Orleans that was doing a lot of environmentally and socially responsible development. They were also starting a energy efficiency consulting division. So I was one of the founding members of that team.
That meant I was working with City of New Orleans with a couple of different charter school networks to reduce their electricity bills, mostly through kind of retro-commissioning activities, changing HVAC settings and occasionally specifying retrofits if we had to. Then later, I went to work at a residential solar EPC running their marketing department and working really closely with sales to kind of broaden our funnel. Then shortly after joining that company, there were a lot of changes in Louisiana’s tax credit availability that essentially led to a drying up of the market and a mass exodus.
So around that time, I had gotten an offer to get a scholarship for an MIT affiliated MBA program that was starting in Southeast Asia. So I thought I could go get an MBA in the States and pay a lot of money for it, or I could go to Southeast Asia for free. So that was the choice that I made. Ended up working for the school in marketing and admissions for a couple years after I graduated.
Then in the middle of the pandemic, one of my former colleagues ended up reaching out with a job opportunity at Cherry Street Energy in Atlanta, which is largely a CNI solar developer. So that was how I ended up kind of coming back to Atlanta and getting back into the clean tech industry, and I’ve been here ever since.
Sharon Lee:
Fantastic. I think that’s really interesting. Well, of course, the whole story is interesting. I love that you jumped all over that and took advantage of the perfect opportunity. But it’s so interesting that a lot of people that I speak with landed somehow in the solar industry. They didn’t plan to be here in the solar or the clean tech industry. I love that you sought to be into this industry. You found a way to do it even if you had to go to the other side of the world to do it. But that’s what this podcast is all about, strong women with a passion, determination. So I love lifting up these incredible stories.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say that my path has still, like I said, it’s still had a lot of twists and turns, even though I knew I wanted to be in an environmental field. It’s very vast and there’s a lot of different areas that you can play in, but I think just chasing those opportunities and following the rollercoaster and continuing to connect with people in the industry is really how it goes.
Sharon Lee:
Absolutely, absolutely. So you moved to Wattch as a principal. So first of all, tell us exactly what Wattch is.
Alex Snedeker:
So at its broadest level, I think you can think of Wattch as a data provider for anything that produces or consumes energy. So right now we are working a lot in the monitoring and control space. We’re working with a lot of CNI solar developers, asset managers own and providers, but there are also tons of applications across technologies such as batteries and EV chargers, as well as other features like incorporating demand response and wreck management, and really everything in between. So it’s a really exciting space to be in for me.
Sharon Lee:
Well, I’ve talked with a number of different people and we’ve talked about actually building the array, the actual construction of it is generally the easiest part of it. You’ve got policy implications and you’ve got permitting and you’ve got civil work and you’ve got all these different things. But so far monitoring has not come up in the conversation. So let’s get a little granular, a 101 on what exactly it means to monitor your solar array.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head in that it usually does not come up a lot in conversations about constructing solar. I’ve run into huge clients that just had totally overlooked having monitoring for their projects. Maybe that is a testament to solar marketing. It’s almost been too effective because now everyone sees solar as so easy to maintain that you don’t have to monitor it. I think it’s true in some ways, solar is very easy to maintain. It’s a very robust energy source, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to monitor it.
Equipment will still fail. The array will get dirty. There might be damage from lightning or hurricanes. There could be shading from trees that are growing next to the array and grow over a corner of it. There’s a million different things that can happen. So when I think about monitoring, I think mostly about, of course, this goes back to my data analysis background, is the production modeling, right?
So you make a model of what the sun should be doing based on real-time weather data, and then you make a model of what your array should be doing based on your equipment ratings. Then you put those two things together and you also look at the data that’s coming out of your system, and then you find the discrepancies between that idealized model and what’s actually happening on the ground, and then use that to diagnose and help optimize your power production, and in a lot of cases, your income.
Sharon Lee:
Right. So really you need to ensure that you are going to maximize the entire life of the system. So in that regard, what kinds of trends and conversations and that sort of thing are happening around monitoring right now?
Alex Snedeker:
Oh, that’s such a good question. I think because of the broad spectrum of people who are playing in the market, and then also the level of sophistication, we’ll kind of run into people who are at very different points in they’re monitoring buying journey. So there are those who are just starting out. They still kind of need some education as to what they need to monitor, why they need to monitor, and specifically why they need hardware agnostic monitoring. Then there are also those who have been around the block and they’ve seen a lot of different tools and they’re buying based on very specific use cases and features.
So we’ve been having kind of all of those conversations and everything in between. But I think a few broad categories that people have been talking about or that I’ve seen coming up more recently are first security. I think we have a long way to go on onsite security. There was recently a high profile hack at an inverter manufacturer. There have been hacks into very large wind power systems, and there’s not really a lot of standards that we can point to right now as far as security goes, but I can see in the next few years or so that it’s going to become probably a huge headache for people who already have deployed assets out in the field right now.
The second thing I hear a lot is having more multiple use tools. So there are a lot of different software products, and I’m sure you know from being in a solar company as well, that the software stack can get a little bit unwieldy. But one of our focuses is just being able to provide tools like CMMS, financial monitoring, maybe some day even real-time energy arbitrage. Everyone kind of wants to see their energy data all in one place.
Then finally, I think integrations is going to become another huge trend. Not just having inverter brand agnostic monitoring, but full technology agnostic monitoring. You see a lot of commercial buildings that they’re getting chargers, they’re incorporating battery storage for resilience, a lot more participating in demand response programs. I’m hearing tons of buzz about micro-grids recently in the past few months.
I think right now you have to adopt a separate technology for each of these products. There’s not a lot of ways to coherently put all of that information together, especially because the industry groups don’t always talk to each other and the standards are different for each type of technology. These are some really, really interesting problems that our company is talking about and actively working on right now.
Sharon Lee:
Well, and it just occurred to me when you were talking about that, it’s one thing when you’re talking about that with one array, one site, one building, but you work with companies also that have multiple sites and multiple systems, and you still need all of that to “speak” to one another in some sort of coherent manner. So challenges on your side, right?
Alex Snedeker:
Absolutely. It’s still funny that we will get people who still claim that they’re only going to use one technology ever and that’s never the case. There’s always going to be five different inverter portals that you have to log into and then all of the kind of tools that come along with that. So it’s definitely just a matter of time before everyone gets kind of fed up with the status quo.
Sharon Lee:
Okay. Let’s shift gears a little bit and let’s go back to the RE+ show, because that was such a fantastic event. I loved everything about it. In fact, we ran into each other at the welcome event at the Angels Stadium, which totally blew my mind because to go to the Angels Stadium and not see a baseball game, my brain was not working around that like, “What’s going on?” But then when I got there, it was such a fantastic event. There was food, there was bands, we got to walk out on the field and all of that.
So it was really fun to turn around and there you are. We ran each into other. But beyond the welcome event, when we’re talking about the actual show and the trade show, was there anything that really stood out to you? Was there a product or a company or a educational session topic or anything like that that you recall?
Alex Snedeker:
Well, I spent essentially the entire events on duty at our booth. So I probably have a very different perspective from you. Hopefully after this, I can get more of your intel on the rest of the conference. But there were a couple of things. I think from at least talking to dozens or probably hundreds of the participants that stood out to me, really first I was impressed at honestly the amount of interest that we had. I think, like I mentioned before, a lot of these broader issues in the industry are also being felt at an individual, company and department level. So we had a lot of people who had in depth knowledge of the pain points of O and M, and also of a lot of the other parts of the value chain of financing, of construction, of commissioning.
I think really the second thing, I was just honestly impressed by the diversity of the attendees. I met people from I’m sure a dozen countries in pretty much every continent, and across the entire spectrum from manufacturers to installers to policy makers and educators. So it was definitely great to see people from outside of the kind of companies and in events that you would normally go to and see really a broader spectrum and cross-section of the renewables industry
Sharon Lee:
Everybody with a very similar goal in mind. So that’s a pretty incredible place to be, no question. During the event, I attended a women’s event, which is kind of where all this started, that Abby Hopper with SEIA hosts every year, which was it’s always top notch. This year was no different. It was very, very well attended. Always cool to be in a room full of women executives in a very male dominated industry. You attended our local empowered Women event here in Atlanta in September, so I was so glad to see you in attendance.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah, it was great to be there. Thanks again for putting that event together. I think it’s super important, like you said as a male dominated industry, to have women representation and to have women who are connecting with each other and providing opportunities for each other. It’s definitely a small community. It’s a small community already doing solar in the Southeast and then added on top of that being very male dominated. I was impressed to find such a diverse crowd of lawyers, utility executives, developers, really everyone from across the industry.
Then as also brought my colleague, Safa as well, who’s one of our front end developers. Honestly, she was kind of nervous coming because she had never worked in clean tech before and didn’t think she would know how to converse with everybody. But she had also been in the similarly male dominated tech industry, and so super sharp, and it was good to get her, I think, in front of a group of ladies that she wouldn’t have otherwise met.
Sharon Lee:
Right. That’s a perfect segue into, I love to talk about mentorship. I know that you normally think about mentorship as you pulling someone up, a brand new person entering their career and all that. So I know that Safa’s not in that particular situation, but mentorship means so many different things. So just having her come with you and interact at an event is a type of mentorship. So I think that that is kind of how we as women work collaborating with one another and all of that. But anyway, so as we’re talking about mentorship and connecting folks with the industry and all of that, what do you consider your approach to mentorship if you have one?
Alex Snedeker:
Well, I would say I’m still mid-career. So I haven’t necessarily actively been looking for mentees quite yet. But I still occasionally get messages on LinkedIn from either people who are in college or grad school or recent grads who are looking for advice in how to break into either sustainability or clean tech. I always take these because even though there’s more resources now than there were 10 years ago when I was getting started, it still really helps to kind of have different perspectives from inside of the industry.
I think some of the hardest things to figure out when you’re on the outside or you don’t have a lot of work experience is there’s a lot of breadth and a lot of depth to the energy industry. So I think it’s worth being able to talk to a bunch of people to figure out what is your niche going to be and what part are you going to play in this energy transformation. So I love talking to people about that. I always take conversations. I also really love hiring both interns and new graduates. I did this at Cherry Street. I hired and managed four interns, actually, three of which were women, and one of which ended up taking a full-time job there after I left.
So yeah, shout out to Ellie. She was amazing, an amazing intern. So it’s really great to also find and train new talent myself, because they’re really the ones who are going to have the most enthusiasm, who really want to make an impact and have a lot of drive. I think just, like I said, kind of need that direction and figuring out how to deepen their knowledge in a certain segment of the field. So yeah, I like being kind of the person who is shepherding them through all the twists and turns in the energy industry.
Sharon Lee:
Right. There’s plenty of those, so well said, for sure. But I’ve been talking incessantly about the Inflation Reduction Act since it passed back in August. Here in Georgia, we just underwent the IRP and are going through the rate case right now. There’s just a whole lot going on in this industry. I’m seeing that businesses are really following this information. I mean, they’re feeling like this is something attainable. It’s not something, “Oh, that’s just for people in Washington.”
I mean, this is something that they can actually feel and touch and that sort of thing. So they’re curious about it and it impacts each of their businesses, which is fantastic. I mean, this is truly the time to control the electricity cost center and own your energy, would you agree?
Alex Snedeker:
Oh, I would absolutely agree. I mean, I do think that there have been opportunities in the past. To a certain extent, it’s like it’s always been there as an option. But now I think we’re starting to really see the tailwinds and we’re starting to see interest even in those segments that would normally be satisfied with the status quo. If you’re an off-taker, you are always used to having working power as a given. You can always turn the lights on. You don’t have to worry about where it comes from, how power sources are maintained.
But I think there have been a confluence of factors that have really changed that in the past few years. First, energy costs as you know are on the rise. Even in Georgia, there are people who have their rates tied to the cost of fuel that are seeing their bills quadruple or quintuple in the last few months. We’ve got natural disasters that are on the rise, or hurricanes, more wildfires and more electrical grid failures. We’re kind of seeing the fragility of the grid as well.
But then, as you mentioned also on the positive side, a ton of opportunities. We’ve got new tax credits that we’ll be able to take advantage of, a lot of new programs for testing out new technologies. I think having those two things together, people can kind of see the benefits of being able to take their energy production into their own hands. There’s a lot more kind of uncertainty around what the availability of power and what the grid’s going to look like, uncertainty around the status quo.
So that will lead people to end up wanting more control in the end. So this is where a Wattch comes in, right? So as the grid gets way more distributed and people are taking control of their own energy assets, how can we make sure that it’s as well managed as if it were centralized production facilities.
Sharon Lee:
Right. Well, that’s fantastic. I’m realizing that Wattch was featured in Solar Power World, which is a national publication. Congratulations. What was that all about?
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah, so we were featured on Solar Power World’s 2021 list of top solar software and monitoring products. They put out a list every year in a bunch of different categories. In the last year, we’ve also had a ton of new features coming out, especially around alerting and control. So hoping that that can get us to renew that spot for the 2022 top solar products list.
Sharon Lee:
All right. Fingers crossed for sure. What about other types of recognition? You guys have been going gangbuster. So what else is going on?
Alex Snedeker:
Right. So originally this kind of came out of the third round of the American-Made Solar Prize, which is a DOE backed competition. So Wattch was actually the grand prize winner in that round. So that’s I guess another piece of recognition. Then also really just I think the growth of our customer base as well. So we’ve been seeing a lot of growth specifically in hardware OEMs, partners who have a hardware product but want to get to market faster and want to be able to have a software or data provider without staffing up on their own.
Then we’re also after RE+, we’ve kind of trended into a lot of both larger utility scale and smaller projects as in Resi data aggregation. So yeah, like I said, we’ve been spending a lot of time kind of strengthening our features and really tailoring them to some of these new aspects of the market.
Sharon Lee:
Nice. Going back to they mention of Solar Power World, it just crossed my mind that my next guest is going to be Kelly Pickerel, who is the editor-in-chief of Solar Power World. So she was just talking about how exciting it is to discover these new products, new companies, and see the solutions that are emerging in this market at such a small world, really.
Alex Snedeker:
Honestly, it is. It’s really funny how you kind of start to see the same players in a lot of these conversations. So I mean, I’m definitely looking forward to listening to your next podcast with her and be sure to put in a good word for Wattch on the next popular products list.
Sharon Lee:
Will do. You can count on it. You can count it. Well, okay. So if I’m going to do that for you, then I’ve got to share something that you may or may not want me to. But when we have lunch recently, I learned something new about you, and I am just totally blown away by it that you signed up for improv classes. That scares me the death to think about doing improv classes, but I think it just so cool. So you have to tell the story about what made you get involved with improv in the first place.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah. Well, it was really twofold I would say. I had just moved to Atlanta and I was having trouble kind of building out a network and wanted to have an activity where I’d meet a lot of diverse people. At the same time, I had also moved from a marketing position at Cherry Street to managing both the marketing and sales teams, which was very anxiety inducing for me because I had never worked in sales. I had always been kind of behind the scenes doing more of the marketing and ops work. So improv I think really helped me get out of my head and start overthinking my interactions and really just taking more initiative in my conversations.
Sharon Lee:
Okay. I mean, would’ve never thought about you being anxious about interacting or being introverted in the least. So that just kind of blows my mind.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah. I mean, perhaps I manage to hide it. Well, I think since it’s been about a year since I first started improv, I’m already starting to approach a lot of the conversations that I have with people differently. In improv, we talk about making an offer. So I think that’s really all conversation is is you walk up to somebody, you make an offer, and they will usually accept it and build on it. So there are five levels that you have to work through at Dad’s Garage, which is the place where I’m taking classes. So I’m currently in level four. I’ll have my first public facing student show at the end of this year. So if you or anybody else is going to be in Atlanta around then, you can see the outcome of some of my improv study.
Sharon Lee:
Oh, I would love it. I would love it. So think back to your level one days and how you got started and everything. What do you think about us trying some sort of little improv vignette?
Alex Snedeker:
Okay. Yeah, no. We could definitely do a quick game or improv exercise.
Sharon Lee:
Okay. So what would be the rules on how to do something like that?
Alex Snedeker:
Okay. So the one that I think comes to mind is one of the easiest ones to do over a call like this would be to do a kind of Pixar pitch story outline where each of us contributes one sentence and we build a story together. So when Pixar executives pitch a story, they will always put it into the same format. So it always starts with once upon a time, and then you kind of give the situation, and end every day, and then you give a kind of status quo until one day, and then you give the conflict.
Then because of that, and then you kind of give another plot point, and because of that, give another plot point, and because of that, give another plot point. Then you can keep doing this until you hit what you think might be the climax, and then you say, “And finally climax happens. Ever since that day, here’s the new status quo that’s happened because of that.” Then ends with the moral of the story is. So that’s kind of a simple one. You can honestly choose any subject, any plot points, like the sillier the better. It’s probably better just to not even think about it or not even needing it to make sense.
Sharon Lee:
Right. Well, let’s make it make sense. [inaudible 00:30:14].
Sharon Lee:
All right. Well, let’s give one a go. But you’re going to have to give this part because I don’t even know what in the world I’m doing. Okay.
Alex Snedeker:
Sure. If you want me to start.
Sharon Lee:
Yeah.
Alex Snedeker:
Okay. So once upon a time, there was a lady bug that lived on the leaf of a house plant.
Sharon Lee:
Okay. Every day, that lady bug checked to see that her spots were still there.
Alex Snedeker:
Until one day she realized that she no longer had any spots. In fact, she was not red but blue.
Sharon Lee:
Okay. That threw me off. Because of that, she decided she would get off of her house plant and go out into the world.
Alex Snedeker:
Because of that, she was essentially invisible against the sky.
Sharon Lee:
Until finally she realized that under all those spots she had wings and flying invisibly in the sky was pretty cool.
Alex Snedeker:
Ever since that day, she has used her powers of invisibility to fight crime.
Sharon Lee:
So the moral of the story is know how you can fight crime and know what your powers are and always go solar.
Alex Snedeker:
Always go solar and always have monitoring.
Sharon Lee:
Always have monitoring. We totally ruined that, but it was still funny.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s essentially the loose format of [inaudible 00:31:50].
Sharon Lee:
Oh my goodness.
Alex Snedeker:
But did great. You built on the offers. You didn’t let you know anything throw you off. So yeah, I think we did pretty well.
Sharon Lee:
We did well. We’ll go with that. We’re not level five, but we’ll go with well enough.
Alex Snedeker:
Yeah, no.
Sharon Lee:
Well, that was a whole lot of fun. I have thoroughly enjoyed talking with you again, not in Anaheim this time, and not on the belt line this time, but still here in Atlanta. So it’s been great talking to you. But if people do want to reach out to you after this, ask about monitoring or just get to know you in general, how can they find you?
Alex Snedeker:
So I am on LinkedIn at Alex Snedeker, S-N-E-D-E-K-E-R. You can also email me at snedeker@wattch, that’s W-A-T-T-C-H.io. I’m usually pretty responsive to both of those channels.
Sharon Lee:
Fantastic. We’ll put links to that down below as well. But we have thoroughly enjoyed you joining us on The Sunnyside today. So thank you for being here, and we wish you well as you dive into the end of your improv and dive into the end of your monitoring year.
Alex Snedeker:
Absolutely. This was a ton of fun. Thank you so much, Sharon.
Sharon Lee:
All right. Thanks so much. We’ll talk to you later.
Alex Snedeker:
Okay.
Sharon Lee:
Bye. Thanks for listening to The Sunnyside Podcast. If you like what you heard, please give us a five star review. You can also email questions, suggestions and compliments to sharon@velosolar.com. The Sunnyside is produced by the Podcast Laundry Production Company and executive produced by Sharon Lee.
[/av_textblock]
[av_textblock textblock_styling_align=” textblock_styling=” textblock_styling_gap=” textblock_styling_mobile=” size=” av-desktop-font-size=” av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” font_color=” color=” id=” custom_class=” template_class=” av_uid=’av-l4r1ko6b’ sc_version=’1.0′ admin_preview_bg=”]
Sharon Lee:
Sharon Lee taps over a decade of solar sales experience, having led the creation of a solar division for a leading manufacturing/construction firm, resulting in over 17 MW of solar in its portfolio as well as solar ultimately becoming its highest-grossing revenue vertical. Lee has been involved in the GA Solar Energy Association, serving on the board of directors as the marketing chair, organizing the annual conference, as well as vice-chair, and ultimately the first female chair of the organization in 2015. She is also a charter member of the Professional Women in Building chapter of the Greater Atlanta Homebuilders Association, a member of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), and Women in Solar Energy (WISE). Lee earned her B.S. degree in communications with double minors in marketing and psychology from Middle Tennessee State University, after spending three years at the University of Tennessee in the pre-health curriculum. Lee is the mom of two boys, ages 14 and 11, and a rabid college football fan. She and her husband, John, spend most of their free time at the baseball or football fields unless they can steal away for a quick round of golf.
Alex Snedeker
Alex Snedeker is the Principal of Wattch and she uses big data, behavioral economics, and process optimization to help growth organizations deliver the largest impact for the smallest price.
Guests Mentioned:
Abby Hopper
LinkedIn: Abby Hopper
Kelly Pickerel
LinkedIn: Kelly Pickerel
Stay Connected:
Sharon Lee
LinkedIn: Sharon Lee
Facebook: Sharon Lee
Alex Snedeker
LinkedIn: Alex Snedeker
Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Spotify.