Jessica Millar
Jessica Millar has been a key actor in bringing load-side Transactive Energy Resources onto grids in New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. She was the co-founder and CTO of VCharge, the first company to provide Frequency Response services to grids using aggregated behind-the-meter load. She focuses on the development of Transactive Energy Management technology platforms capable of running large-scale, distributed Transactive Energy Resources.
Millar earned a PhD in Mathematics from MIT, and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Jessica spent her early career studying and teaching mathematical logic. She later moved into computational complexity, studying online optimization with scientists at the content delivery firm Akamai. As a visiting researcher at Microsoft she worked on distributed computation. She taught mathematics at Harvard, the University of British Columbia, and Brown. Leaving academics, she ran an incubator commodities trading fund for several years before founding VCharge. She has served as the Vice President of the Rhode Island Wind Alliance and helped start Project Get Ready RI, a non-profit alliance preparing Rhode Island for 10,000 plug-in electric vehicles. Jessica lives in New Haven, CT.
George Baker
George Baker was the co-founder of VCharge, a smart grid company demonstrating the commercial viability of load-side Transactive Energy Resources. Until July 1, 2010, he was the Herman C. Krannert Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he taught for 25 years. During the period 2007-2009, while on leave from Harvard, Baker was the developer of the 4.5 MW Fox Islands Wind project on the island of Vinalhaven Maine, the largest community-owned wind generator in the eastern US. As CEO of VCharge, Baker led the company’s successful effort to build and operate the world’s largest aggregated load-side Transactive Energy Resources in New England, Pennsylvania, and the UK. He also helped develop and negotiate a 4-year contract with National Grid UK to deliver a novel Frequency Response product. These efforts culminated in the sale of the company in December 2016 to OVO Energy, a UK energy supplier.
Baker earned a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard, an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and a BA from Harvard College. During his academic career he helped create the field of Organizational Economics. He served for 17 years as a Director of the Swans Island Electric Coop, a consumer-owned electric distribution cooperative serving the islands of Swans Island and Frenchboro in Hancock County Maine. He spearheaded the effort to sell the Coop to Canadian energy company Emera in 2017. George lives in Weymouth, MA.
Chris Demarco
Christopher DeMarco is among the world’s leading authorities on the control and stability of electric power systems. As a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison his research focuses on electromechanical and voltage stability analyses --the ability of a power system to recover from line faults, load disturbances, and rapid ramping or loss of generation; practically implementable algorithms to indicate in real time the vulnerability of the power system; and the use of robust control design as a means of guaranteeing stable operation of the electric system over a wide range of operating conditions. As a Site Director for PSERC (The Power Systems Engineering Research Center), an organization created in 1996 as a National Science Foundation Industry-University Cooperative Research Center, he works to address key challenges in creating a modern electric energy infrastructure.
DeMarco received his PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from UC Berkeley, and a BS in EECS from MIT. Chris lives in Madison, WI.