2050 Partners is a majority woman-owned California Benefits Corporation. We are decarbonization change drivers, navigators, and advocates who help utilities, public, private and NGO clients shorten the path to carbon neutrality and maximize their return on investment by influencing regulations and policy, enhancing energy efficiency strategies, and establishing energy leadership.
Principals
Ted Pope has worked in the energy efficiency and decarbonization field for over three decades. On behalf of his clients, he has taken leadership roles in several state, federal and international multi-stakeholder energy-efficiency initiatives involving public, private and non-profit entities. He currently oversees client’s energy efficiency technology field research and statewide energy efficiency program portfolio advisory projects. Prior to founding 2050 Partners, Ted designed, implemented, and oversaw a variety of energy and water efficiency programs for utility, governments, and non-profit clients, including emerging technology demonstrations and pilot programs. Ted is a seasoned energy policy and appliance standards regulatory intervenor in various forums, including proceedings before the Department of Energy, California Energy Commission, and California Public Utilities Commission.
Ted earned his Bachelor of Science in City & Regional Planning from Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, with a concentration in engineering.
He lives in Orinda, California, with his co-founder and wife, Whitney Pope.
Whitney Pope co-founded 2050 Partners in 2015 to help utility, public, private, and non-profit clients shorten the path to carbon neutrality. Whitney has a significant role in managing the daily operations of this start-up majority women-owned California Benefits Corporation. She is instrumental in subcontracting with a wide array of experts who support our projects. Whitney enjoys communications and has held several roles involving development of communications systems for stakeholders.
She was responsible for the original communications system for the California Energy Efficiency Coordinating Committee (“CAEECC”), the public discussion forum authorized by the CPUC in 2015 for input into the design and implementation of 10-year Energy Efficiency Business Plans. She is also detail-oriented and enjoys projects where she can use this skill.
Alex Chase provides leadership, execution, and strategy development for energy and climate related projects. He has helped lead clients in the utility, public agency, and non-profit sectors to achieve significant success through their energy efficiency, water efficiency, and clean transportation programs. His work contributing to state, national, and international codes and standards has spanned hundreds of product categories and has played a role in shaping energy and water use and policy in California, the United States, and beyond. He has helped design and implement award-winning incentive programs.
Alex holds engineering degrees from Northwestern and Stanford. He has taught a graduate-level course at Stanford on the energy demand-side management industry.
He lives in Oakland with his wife and two children.
Directors
John Bade is a technical lead for our clients on HVAC appliance efficiency standards and provides analysis and advice on many federal rulemakings, including significant improvements to the VRF and Commercial Unitary Air Conditioner and Heat Pump test procedures. He also provides technical leadership on the California Title 20 Fan and Industrial Blower efficiency regulation.
John was an engineer for Johnson Controls for 20 years and represented the company on the ASHRAE SSPC 90.1. He continued to work on building energy codes after joining 2050 Partners. His scope expanded to include California Title 24, where he led the update to the fan power limits in the 2022 version. He is also chair of the IECC Commercial HVACR and Water Heating Subcommittee and a voting member of the Commercial Consensus Committee.
Understanding the point of view of all stakeholders is essential to our clients, and John keeps his HVAC industry knowledge updated as an active participant in most AHRI standards technical committees.
Lily Baldewicz leads an engineering group working in regulatory policy, impact assessment, market baselining, and test method development for industrial motor driven products. These products include induction motors, synchronous motors, variable frequency drives, air compressors, and pumps. For over 10 years, she has supported the development and implementation of commercial and industrial best practice recognition programs, benchmarking programs, emerging technology programs, voluntary standards, industry test methods, building codes, and equipment regulations for several residential, commercial, and industrial products.
She and her partner reside in Upstate NY.
Jennifer Barnes has over 25 years of experience in the energy industry. She began her energy career performing energy audits for small commercial customers. She advanced through the utility ranks to manage commercial energy efficiency programs for both SDG&E and PG&E, including overseeing evaluation studies and conducting portfolio planning.
In 2008, Jennifer transitioned to the consulting side of the industry conducting evaluation and research studies for efficiency and distributed generation programs. Since joining 2050 Partners, she has been able to leverage her rich background in energy efficiency programing to advise clients in energy policy and market transformation. Jennifer’s diverse background gives her unique insights into the types of challenges faced by our industry.
Jennifer holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from the University of San Diego and an Master of Business Administration from San Diego State University.
Steffi Becking has over 15 years of experience in project management, product management, and data analysis in the environmental engineering field. She is experienced in working in private, public, and non-profit sectors. Since 2015, she has been focused on promoting the efficient use of energy and water through code advocacy work at local, state of California, and federal levels. She supported advocacy on efficiency for a range of topics including right-sizing water piping, graywater pre-plumbing, plumbing products, controlled environment agriculture, and nonresidential lighting. Steffi currently serves on the Board of Directors for the California Irrigation Institute, the oldest independent forum on irrigation and water in California. She also served on the Board of Directors for two wastewater agencies in California.
Steffi earned a Master of Science in Environmental Engineering and Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from University of California, Berkeley.
She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
For over 20 years, Debra Brunk has leveraged her engineering, statistical, and process improvement skills to solve complex problems in Energy, Sustainability, and Healthcare. She is an experienced leader who successfully builds consensus with both internal and external stakeholders. Her strengths include creating, launching, and managing complex new initiatives, programs, and products, while establishing and leading high-performance technical teams. Debra has significant experience both developing and influencing the development of energy conservation standards and test procedures for residential, commercial, and industrial appliances. She has designed and implemented multiple appliance certification programs.
Debra has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Cornell and a B.S. in chemical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. Debra lives in Phoenix with her husband and two rescue pups.
Kathleen Bryan has over 18 years of experience in the field of building energy efficiency. She worked for 15 years in local government at City and County of San Francisco’s Department of Environment. Her focus was Local Government Partnership Programs with PG&E. She spent time as an auditor in the field, and later as a program manager for a large-scale retrofit program, SF Energy Watch. More recent projects include a refrigerant replacement program and an energy efficiency marketing, outreach, and technical assistance program in disadvantaged communities. Before 2006, she focused on using building modeling tools to improve the performance of new buildings.
Kathleen has a mechanical engineering degree from Stanford.
She lives in Montana with her husband and two children.
With over 30 years of appliance industry experience, Richard Donner is skilled in product development, quality, service and regulatory operations in the consumer goods industry focused mainly on home appliances. He has led both new product development projects as well as quality focused projects. His background includes experience with OEM manufacturers, AHAM, testing agencies as well as retailers. Rich’s focus at 2050 Partners is on state and federal energy standards for home appliances.
Richard holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as a Master of Business Administration from Keller Graduate School of Management.
He lives in the Chicago area with his wife.
Kristen Driskell has more than a decade of legal and policy experience in California state government as an attorney and as manager of the California Energy Commission’s appliance efficiency program, where she led teams of engineers and scientists to develop and implement complex state appliance efficiency standards for computers, monitors, lighting, and plumbing products. She advocated in U.S. Department of Energy appliance efficiency rulemaking proceedings to help drive energy-saving rules that would benefit California. Her collaborative and data-driven approach on several U.S. Department of Energy rulemaking working groups helped achieve consensus on new and amended federal standards for such products as pool pump motors and central air conditioners and heat pumps. Before joining 2050 Partners, she served as Director of the Efficiency Division and as the CEC’s representative on the Appliance Standards Rulemaking federal Advisory Committee (ASRAC).
James Frey is an experienced electrical engineer currently focusing the Clean Transportation, Flexible Demand, and Energy Storage. His most recent work includes charging infrastructure cost models for both light-duty and medium/heavy-duty vehicles used to inform future CALGreen Energy codes. James has held strategy, product management and engineering roles with global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) covering building and IT power systems, consumer devices, and lighting controls. He regularly contributes to cross-industry standards at SAE and the CSA Group for electric vehicle charging infrastructure and energy management. He is passionate about saving the environment for future generations. James believes teams will find the best sustainable solution when they balance the needs of society and business while expecting the best from the technology at hand.
James holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science degree, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He lives in the Boston region and spends his spare time with his family, volunteering to restore a stately home, and playing tennis.
Nazme Mohsina has over a decade of extensive experience in HVAC industry. She supports codes and standards projects. Prior to joining 2050 Partners, she was Technical Director at Air Movement and Control Association (AMCA). During her career, she has engaged with domestic and global teams of satellite offices and testing laboratories to deliver high quality results. She has been a key contributor to ANSI/AMCA and ISO Technical Committees. Her strong leadership skills with ability to work effectively with clients influences and organizes teams to attaining shared goals. She is a passionate and trustworthy leader and has excellent work ethic, self-motivated, detail oriented, energetic, and customer centric.
Nazme is a recipient of Engineered Systems Magazine's 20 to Watch: Women in HVAC Contest Winners.
Decker Ringo has over twelve years of consulting experience, with a focus on building decarbonization and appliance efficiency standards. He has tackled the challenge of GHG emissions reduction at several levels of granularity, leading studies that have examined interventions at the building scale, the program scale, and the whole economy scale. At the building scale, he has studied utility customers’ energy and cost savings from the conversion of individual appliances and appliance components. At the program scale, he has assisted utilities in updating their baseline assumptions for energy efficiency programs and updating their prescribed methods of calculating energy savings. At the economy-wide level, Decker has designed analytical models and provided expertise to help public utilities understand their roles and the rates of change that are required to meet various state and national climate goals.
Coleman Stivers, a skilled Project Management Professional (PMP), has a track record of leading successful projects using both waterfall and agile methodologies. With experience in operations, research, product development, product commercialization, process development, and construction, Coleman has delivered exceptional results. Notable projects he has led include developing new energy efficiency measures, inspecting hundreds of miles of gas transmission lines in Northern California, and inventing new products across multiple sectors. He is co-inventor on one issued patent and principal inventor on three provisional patents.
At 2050 Partners, Coleman manages field monitoring research projects focusing on controlled environment horticulture (CEH), dedicated outdoor air systems (DOAS), and hydronic heat pumps, publishing numerous research reports. He also implements numerous company-wide operational improvements, enhancing productivity and efficiency.
Coleman holds a Bachelor of Science in Biosystems Agricultural Engineering from the University of Kentucky, specializing in Controlled Environments.
He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.
Garth Torvestad has over 15 years of experience leading research projects and programs to inform land-use, energy, and climate policy. Garth leverages methods ranging from energy modeling to market surveys to develop data to inform sound policy, especially California’s Title 24, Part 6 Standards. Over the course of his career, he has principally focused on developing primary data through field studies, demonstration projects, and lab tests.
In his current role as Program Manager for Code Readiness work, Garth oversees engineering teams to design and implement energy efficiency and building decarbonization studies, then works to translate this primary data into a language accessible to business leaders and policy makers. Garth’s projects have involved close coordination with private sector clients (including building product and technology manufactures, trade associations, land developers, and production homebuilders) as well as public and quasi-public clients (including the California Energy Commission, municipal and investor-owned utilities, local governments, NGOs, and national labs). Garth enjoys bringing this unique public/private perspective to his work supporting the development of consensus-based, data-driven policies and regulations.
Garth has a bachelor’s degree from CalPoly, SLO, and a Master of Science in Urban Land Development from CSUS.
He shares his Sacramento home with his wife, two boys, and a 120 lb. Great Pyrenees dog.
Jay Yang possesses over 20 years of industry experience in system design, manufacturing, testing, and product management. He has led diverse teams to complete tasks in a wide variety of technological fields including wireless communications, broadband network, and Internet of Thing. Since joining 2050 Partners, Jay has been managing and collaborating with industry stakeholders in multiple consumer electronics energy efficiency initiatives such as Televisions, Small Network Equipment and Residential Energy Storage.
During his time at Motorola and CommScope, Jay served as a Subject Matter Expert and system architect for multiple product lines to optimize power and energy efficiency. He managed cross-functional teams to implement energy efficiency design in over twenty products and systems.
Jay holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University and a Master of Business Administration degree from Temple University. Jay is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).
Consultants
Fawn Brooks has over a decade of experience and responsibility in utility consulting and climate change research. She is experienced in leveraging data to improve efficiencies, develop strategies, and drive process improvements. Fawn’s educational background is in climate change and hydrology focusing on statistical and spatial analysis. She is adaptive, flexible, and able to learn, synthesize, and apply new concepts and technologies to solve problems.
In her current role as Senior Consultant, Fawn supports the CalMTA (California Market Transformation Administrator) program by providing process development, analysis, and research. In her previous role, she managed the implementation of four energy efficiency and demand response programs.
Fawn holds a Bachelors of Science in Geography with Environmental Analysis from the University of Louisville.
Jenn Fox brings 25 years of environmental engineering experience to the 2050 Partners team. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Jenn worked with regulators, utilities, and industries to reduce air pollution. She received service medals for air pollution rule development in California and cross-media contributions in Hawai’i. Jenn has led specific energy efficiency projects: reducing municipal energy and water use, benchmarking facilities for energy savings, writing greenhouse gas emissions reduction plans, and promoting energy efficient water heating technologies through well-designed utility incentive programs. At the ClimateWorks Foundation, Jenn led the strategic planning and measurement and evaluation teams; working with a distributed matrix of international non-profits, technical experts, and the broader philanthropic community to scale greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Following her MS degree in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University; Jenn was awarded a Fulbright grant to research the effects of electricity deregulation on hydroelectric projects.
Maya Gantley is a green building professional with over six years of energy efficiency and decarbonization project management and consulting experience. At 2050 Partners, she manages field demonstration and lab testing projects under the Codes and Standards Code Readiness program. She also supports the California Building Energy Modeling (CalBEM) collective. In all endeavors, Maya brings a passion for supporting high-efficient building solutions that reduce carbon emissions, improve occupant comfort, and support a resilient future.
Prior to joining 2050 Partners, Maya worked at the Association for Energy Affordability, where she provided both technical and program management support for energy efficiency programs. During that time, she guided multifamily buildings through whole building retrofits by creating energy models, calculating energy savings, and producing detailed retrofit recommendations. Maya also has extensive experience building energy models in CBECC and EnergyPro to help all-electric multifamily new construction projects meet and exceed CA Title 24 compliance requirements.
Maya earned her Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Kyle Garske is an experienced mechanical engineer and sustainability consultant with over 7 years of expertise in design engineering, building performance, and data analysis. He has guided clients through the design and development of high-efficiency green buildings as well as certifications with green standards such as LEED. Kyle brings his engineering expertise, building mechanical system design in commercial and high-rise residential construction, and energy analysis in software such as eQuest and IESVE to 2050 Partners.
Kyle graduated from Oregon State University with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering.
Jeff Staller is an experienced energy management professional with over twenty years of varied experience and responsibility in consulting and research in energy efficiency and utility programs. He strives to apply a balance of subject matter expertise and technical skills, with project management experience to provide actionable advice to clients and customers. He has extensive experience with in-situ data collection and data analysis for emerging solutions and building science research projects, normalized meter energy consumption analysis efforts, Title 24 codes and standards enhancement (CASE) studies, and energy efficiency consulting on sustainable building projects. This expertise also includes whole building energy modeling utilizing a variety of modeling software programs including EnergyPro, CBECC, eQuest, EnergyPlus, BeOPT, and TREAT.
Shilpa Surana has more than a decade of experience ranging from sustainability consulting to modeling high performance and net zero buildings. She leverages her consulting and energy modeling experience in advancing building codes and appliance standards at state and national levels. She is a voting member of the 2024 IECC Residential Economics, Modeling and Whole building metrics subcommittee. Along with her interest in advancing net zero design and supporting market transformation efforts in emerging technologies, she has extensive experience in project management, client management and stakeholder engagements to deliver high quality results. She was the first recipient of the Net Zero Fellowship, Energy Trust of Oregon grant in 2017-2018.
Shilpa holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from India and two Masters of Science degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and London School of Economics and Political Sciences.
She loves to hike and explore the outside with her husband and two kids.
Elise Wall has spent over a decade professionally embracing the four Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and #RStats. At 2050 Partners, Elise supports utilities and government agencies by researching modeling methods for the electrical grid (BUGMAP), collaborating on data analyses for building and appliance standards (cooktops, water heaters, and pipe sizing), and serving as the founding program manager for the CalBEM initiative. Overall, her work she strives for effective solutions, lasting consensus, and cooperative relationships.
Prior to her work at 2050 Partners, Elise helped a variety of clients achieve their goals in the politics and science of sustainability. Consulting for small businesses and Fortune 100 companies, Elise guided products and sites into compliance with safety and environmental regulations. Working at national labs and academic institutions, she experimented with pollutant mobility in high-precision laboratories and developed novel pollution prediction tools for the Chemical Life Cycle Collaborative.
Elise holds a Masters in Environmental Science and Management from UC Santa Barbara, specializing in energy, climate, and pollution prevention.
Staff
Amandine Gourves-Ingalls has held a variety of responsibilities over the past 15 years in France and North America, including managing projects from purchase order to delivery, providing technical support, managing relationships with clients and subcontractors, leading system design and implementation, and overseeing systems installation and start-up. As a technical advisor, coordinator, and project manager, she has several years of experience in industrial water and wastewater treatment and in management of non-profits. In her last position, she oversaw many aspects of the organization including day-to-day operations, staff coordination and training, marketing activities, and event planning.
Amandine holds a Master of Science in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Rennes (France).
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and her son.
Carrie Hillen has over 20 years of client and customer service experience in accounting, litigation consulting, banking, and recruiting and placement services. As an accountant and litigation consultant Carrie analyzed large sets of data, developed complex financial models, and conducted detailed market analysis. For ten years, Carrie and her husband owned and operated the largest domestic placement agency in California. Prior to selling the company, Carrie was responsible for hiring and managing staff, developing new service lines, and managing the final resolution of all escalated customer service issues. With 2050 Partners, Carrie enjoys the variety of responsibilities from recruiting and onboarding of new employees, assisting with proposal development, and administrative roles on client projects.
Carrie has a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from UCLA and a Master of Business Administration from the Walter Haas School of Business.
Emma Pang is a multifaceted professional with a passion for data analysis and operational excellence, with a track record in marketing, sales, and operations. Her background includes roles in marketing and communications, leveraging data-driven strategies to elevate brand visibility, and ensuring data quality for high-profile clients. Emma holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, supplemented by a minor in Chinese Studies from The New School. In early 2020, she undertook a rigorous 26-week Data Analytics program at Columbia University, fine-tuning her analytical skills and engaging in diverse projects involving machine learning, Python, and other coding languages.