We’re proud of the intelligent, passionate, and hardworking people that make up the Bright Power team. Each month, you’ll get a chance to meet one of them, understand how they contribute to the organization, and what makes them excited to come to work every day.
Meet David Garza, Energy Engineer.
What are some of the things you like most about working at Bright Power?
I like how Bright Power brings together motivated, hardworking individuals who are creative, constructive, and continually looking to improve and help each other learn. Pre-COVID, we had an annual retreat, and now the California Business Unit has had two (safe!) team weeks where we got time to bond with our colleagues and work on solutions to make our work better for ourselves and enable the company to grow. It is especially in these sessions that the spirit and culture of the company are best captured, in my opinion. In addition, Bright Power provides us with many opportunities through a large number of projects and services available, allowing us to expand our knowledge and contribute to reducing our impact on the natural environment. We are encouraged to follow our interests to further our understanding, capabilities, and impact.
What’s something people might not know about you or your role?
In addition to my typical project development duties, I also maintain and develop Excel-based tools for the California Business Unit and the Operations, Measurement, and Verification (OM&V) for several Mercy Housing projects we implemented from 2017 to 2020. In OM&V, we track how the energy and water saving measures we implemented at projects are performing. If the project is not performing as expected, we investigate any potential operational changes that might have negatively impacted the project’s performance. Then, we look for maintenance or retro-commissioning that can be done to ensure the performance of the project. This can range from something as simple as changing an irrigation schedule to troubleshooting equipment or developing a custom maintenance schedule, which results in some very interesting findings and insights.
Tell us about a project or accomplishment for which you’re proud.
The multiple ongoing improvements and iterations of our project development process, which I have contributed to. Which range from calculation standardization such as creating a lighting extrapolation tool, to resource and pipeline management with the creation of a centralized audit pipeline tracker. Developing process efficiency improvements are rewarding as they reduce our time spent, minimize human error on calculations, and allow for better workload management and communication. They also enable us to reduce the seasonality of our business through better forecasting. Thus, ultimately allowing my coworkers and me to expand our impact and to grow our business.
What’s the one service offering we have that you think is the most beneficial to clients and why?
I would have to say measurement and verification based on my experience with OM&V, as there is a lot that can be done to help property operations maintain our projected savings. As properties’ maintenance teams are faced with decisions when something stops working as intended, it is much easier for them to go back to what they are familiar with. We are there to provide them with data and guidance to make the right decision for their properties and tenants.
This is especially important in our move towards electrification. It is highly beneficial to our clients that we aid their teams in resolving issues with equipment they are not yet as familiar with as this allows new technologies such as heat pump water heaters to become a more widely used technology and not get a bad reputation. Measuring and verifying the performance of said systems helps our clients maintain greenhouse gas reductions and the operational and utility savings we intended and our clients expected.