Bob Krause

About Bob Krause

A results-oriented policy strategist who excels at identifying new opportunities, building teams, and solving problems. A true entrepreneur with the vision to start from a concept, plus the discipline, rigor, and judgment to deliver success. Areas of excellence include visioning, team building, consensus building, data science, and executing on plan.

Experience

1. Microgrid Policy Strategist

   Spark Communities

   Mar 2021 — Present · Berkeley, CA, US

   A group of seasoned energy professionals have come together around the shared mission of enabling the development of community microgrids and other DERs at scale throughout the state. Spark Communities team members are leveraging diverse perspectives, expertise, and networks to overcome regulatory, financial, and technical challenges to move California communities toward a sustainable, resilient, and equitable energy future. Despite these challenges, we’ve identified 3 promising strategies that navigate around existing regulatory obstacles to enable the development of FOM community DERs at scale now - well ahead of the 20 to 30 years widely regarded as the baseline timeframe.Spark Community MIcrogrids is a transformative approach to multi-property microgrid development that utilizes a targeted, city-franchised, municipal power utility with a service area that includes only those customers served by the microgrid. The Spark Community Utilities strategy, is a California adaptation of Ann Arbor’s Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) — an opt-in municipal utility that operates alongside the local investor-owned utility. Our Spark Community MHP initiative works with master-metered mobile home park operators to upgrade their private distribution grid with solar panels, batteries, and power control systems to significantly reduce power costs and provide a number of other advantages to the operators, residents, the municipality, and the local economy.Each of these disruptive policy strategies bypass traditional obstacles such as negotiations with IOUs over the value of existing infrastructure, over-the-fence restrictions, skewed CPUC regulatory oversight, interconnection queue delays, and the need for legislative or ballot campaigns.

Education

• University of Michigan

  B.S., Computer Science

  1983 — 1987

Skills

• User Experience
• Management
• Saas
• Leadership
• Start-Ups
• Architecture
• Strategic Planning
• System Architecture
• Distributed Systems
• Embedded Systems
• Mobile Devices
• Software Engineering
• Mobile Applications
• Databases
• Venture Capital
• Entrepreneurship
• Web Applications
• Unix
• C++
• Software Development