J. Charles Smith – Executive Director
Charlie is a member of the IEEE Power and Energy Society; a member of CIGRE, the International Council on Large Electric Systems; a US representative to the IEA Wind Annex Task 25 on Design and Operation of Power Systems with Large Amounts of Wind Power, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a guest editor for the IEEE Power and Energy magazine, and a past editor for the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. He is a recipient of the IEEE PES Ramakumar Family Renewable Energy Excellence Award, and currently serves as the Technical Advisor to the US National Committee for IEC SC 8A, Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Generation.
He received his BSME and MS degrees from MIT in 1970. He currently is the Executive Director of the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG). Previously, he served as President of Electrotek Concepts, an international power engineering consulting firm. He has 50 years of experience in the electric power industry.
Debra Lew – Associate Director
Debbie is the Associate Director of ESIG and has a background in wind, solar and distributed energy resource integration with a focus on 100% clean energy. She was previously a consultant, a senior technical director at GE Energy Consulting, and held a variety of roles during her 16-year tenure at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, including secondment to the Hawaiian Electric Company. She is the Immediate Past Chair of the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s Wind and Solar Power Coordinating Committee. She has a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University and a BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from MIT.
Julia Matevosyan – Chief Engineer
Julia is ESIG’s Chief Engineer and has more than 20 years of experience in the power industry. Prior to joining ESIG, Matevosyan was the Lead Planning Engineer of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). In her time with ERCOT, she worked on adequacy of system inertial response, system flexibility, frequency control and performance issues related to high penetration levels of inverter-based generation and ancillary services market design. Julia received her BSc from Riga Technical University in Latvia, and her MSc and PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden.
Jason MacDowell – Chief Systems Integration Officer
Jason is Senior Director – Technology, Strategy & Policy at GE Energy Consulting. Jason brings over 22 years of energy industry experience, where he has worked with a broad range of governments, policy makers, grid companies and generation owners around the world. In addition to chairing ESIG’s Reliability Working Group, MacDowell will advise and assist with other ESIG activities, including playing a key role in ESIG’s participation and contributions to the Global Power System Transformation Consortium (G-PST) during the project.
James Okullo – Director of System Planning
James is ESIG’s Director of System Planning and has more than a decade of experience in the power industry. Prior to joining ESIG, Okullo was Manager, Strategic Assessments at the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). In this role, his areas of focus included forward-looking resource adequacy and accreditation of capacity resources, evaluation of system reliability attributes under an evolving resource mix, emerging generation and transmission technologies, and support of other MISO priorities, such as the Long-Range Transmission Planning.
Ryan Willis – Director, Marketing & Operations
Ryan is the Director of Marketing & Operations and leads and coordinates ESIG’s marketing and communications efforts and manages the organization’s operational activities. He has more than 15 years of marketing and communications experience, having most recently served as Vice President of Ackermann Marketing and PR.
While at Ackermann, Willis managed a number of ESIG initiatives, including overall communications efforts, social media, webinars and renaming and rebranding the organization.
Brooke Brown- Operations & Maintenance Users Group Coordinator
Brooke is ESIG’s Operations & Maintenance Users Group Coordinator. She comes to ESIG with a strong background in the wind industry, supporting two Sites in the Pacific Northwest for over four years. During that time, Brooke has been the lead on projects including curtailment and de-rate analysis, preventative maintenance quality assurance, and training compliance.
Prior to her work in renewable generation, Brooke received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Human Development from Washington State University. She worked in education, teaching GED classes upon graduation.