Tanya Barham

Tanya Barham

Community Energy Labs

    Tanya is the CEO of Community Energy Labs (CEL) a woman-owned and led energy technology company with a mission to enable affordable decarbonization of community buildings by 2030. CEL's core AI-powered clean building control platform was a regional winner of CleanTech Open's 2020 international accelerator, an overall winner in the 2020 Madrona Venture Labs Go Vertical challenge, a 2021 impel+ building innovator, EPRI Incubate Energy 2021 cohort member and 2021 US Department of Energy SBIR awardee. CEL emerged from the non-profit PECI as a nimble social enterprise with a suite of grid-edge and community-centric IT approaches to climate adaptation, local empowerment and clean energy. CEL’s executive team have track records that span 20 years from startups to organizations as large as Southern California Edison, NASA and Southern Company. In 2019, while at PECI, the team won the Smart Electric Power Alliance’s Visionary of the Year award for developing scalable community approaches to energy projects and technology deployment.

    All Sessions by Tanya Barham

    Day 1 August 15, 2023
    10:30 am - 12:00 pm

    Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings

    Continued progress toward the electrification of the built environment creates both a massive challenge and an opportunity for eliminating carbon emissions. The challenge of new loads from electrification on the utility system requires enhanced abilities for shifting, shedding, and modulating those loads to the mutual benefit of the building owner and serving utility. The effort to scale grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs) is well underway. What are the risks to all parties in getting this wrong? This session will bring together voices from the nation’s leading national laboratory on GEBs with building owners and service providers who are deploying GEBs strategies in commercial and institutional buildings across the country.

    Day One August 22, 2022
    10:30 am - 12:00 pm

    Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings (GEBs)

    This session will feature two “case study” presentations on GEBs. Additional SMEs will join in a moderated discussion of GEB potential.

    Day Two August 25, 2021
    1:00 pm - 2:15 pm

    Deriving Value from a Smarter Grid-interactive Building

    The traditional relationship between the energy utility and the building owner/operator is changing. “Smart” technology ranging from more elaborate and capable sensor networks, the analytical tools to do something with these data streams, more robust fault detection systems, all the way to artificial intelligence controls technology open a new era in operational efficiency opportunity. In parallel, two-way dynamic communication capabilities with the serving utility leverage these same set of innovations that benefit a rapidly changing set of conditions for managing a utility system. The utility case for this grid-interactive building condition is increasingly clear. But what is the value proposition for those who own and operate buildings to re-structure their utility relationship? This session will explore the business case for smart grid-interactive buildings from the owner/operator perspective. Expert voices will expand this value discussion far beyond the typical energy cost framework and highlight areas ranging from electric vehicle charging to building resiliency to building use flexibility in a post-pandemic world.