Solar Asset Management 2.0: Meeting O&M Challenges and Maximizing Performance

Daisy Chung joined SEPA in 2014. She focuses on utility deployment at the distribution level, with specialty in asset management and operations & maintenance. She also collaborates with industry stakeholders such as electric service providers and integrators.

Daisy comes with seven years of thin‐films engineering, process implementation, as well as technical knowledge transfer experience from Samsung. Through her global experience, she specialized in system start‐ups, qualification, standardization, and failure and root-cause analysis through Six Sigma data analytics and system monitoring strategies.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, with minors in Business Foundation and Chinese Language from the University of Texas; she is also an honor’s graduate of the Master in International Public Affairs program, specializing in Energy Analysis and Policy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Longhorns and badgers play nicely together in her household.

Eric Daniels, Managing Director and CEO of Suncycle USA, a sister company of Suncycle GmbH founded in 2007 for the purpose of conducting field diagnostics, quality assessment, and repair of solar power plants. To date, over 3 million modules have been evaluated, using proprietary Suncycle mobile and mini-labs for in-place module inspections.

Before Suncycle USA, Mr. Daniels served as the regional president for Robert Bosch LLC’s North American solar division. There he introduced structured financing, PPAs, loan and lease products to promote solar system sales.

Prior to Bosch Solar Energy, Mr. Daniels served as Chief Technology Officer for BP Solar. In addition to managing over $100 million in solar system field inspections. He and his team developed and introduced numerous patented technologies that increased the reliability of solar modules. Many of these advances are being commercialized today.
Mr. Daniels also holds a patent for an advanced DC-microgrid Smart Home and Building architecture that integrates solar with storage, HVAC, EV charging and micro-wind generators.

Ernie Tom is a Senior Engineer at Salt River Project (SRP), a utility company, in Tempe, Arizona. Grid Modernization Services provides maintenance on its distributed PV resources. Ernie received his Bachelors of Engineering and MBA from Arizona State University. Ernie has been involved in solar maintenance since 2009 and has helped develop solar maintenance plans for off-grid and commercial scale PV systems. His current focus is to create a cost and performance benchmarking platform for utility solar stakeholders through the EUCG and its Solar Committee.