Built with people from the field

Electrical design engineer and founder of Ascend Education Group and Ascension Renewables LLC, with 7+ years in the industry and 250+ distributed energy projects across nine states.

Her work spans feasibility, electrical design, project engineering and management, procurement, product development, installation, and operations.

Working across the whole project lifecycle showed her how decisions in one discipline create consequences in another. That became the foundation for Ascend.

Now her focus is the work she cares about most: educating the next generation of engineers, technicians, and leaders who will build and run tomorrow's energy systems.

Jay Kallsen has worked in data centers for more than 13 years. He started as a critical facilities technician, spent more than seven years in data center operations at Google, and went on to lead infrastructure across six data centers totaling 202 MW.

Today he manages commissioning clients at Impact Cx, a Salas O'Brien company. At Ascend, he teaches mission-critical infrastructure, turning hyperscale operations and commissioning experience into training for people entering critical environments.

John-Ross Cromer has worked in solar for 18 years. After starting as a control systems engineer at Fluor, he founded Community.Solar in 2008 and ran it for 12 years before moving to the equipment side, leading product and technical work at Fortress Power and Sol-Ark.

He is now Director of Business Development for commercial at EG4 Electronics, and brings an engineer's view of how inverters and batteries actually behave once they are installed.

Quinn Weber has been in solar for 12 years. He started as a PV designer in 2014, led a team of eight PV design engineers, and worked as a technical program manager at Tesla before managing PV and solar thermal engineering at Aztec Solar and residential products at Sol-Ark.

Today he is CEO of King Electric & Solar, bringing a designer's eye to work that has to pass inspection and hold up in the field.

Greg Schmidt has worked in the electrical trade for more than 35 years, starting as an electrical maintenance engineer in the U.S. Coast Guard. He owned and ran BANG Electric for nearly 13 years, managed solar field service at Sunnova, and now directs field operations at Sun Atlas Power.

A master electrician licensed in 40 states, he also trains first- through fourth-year electrical apprentices, and helps keep Ascend's licensing and code content accurate and practical.

Darin Hadinger has worked in renewable energy for more than 13 years, from teaching solar, wind and microgrid courses at Hocking College's Energy Institute to leading Pivot Solar, which trained veterans and people returning from incarceration for solar careers.

He has led commercial solar development and finance work, and today he is building RE:, including RE:BOOT Operations, its commissioning and field services arm.

Lee Vernon brings over 33 years of electrical experience and 20 years in the solar industry, specializing in utility-scale PV commissioning, operations, maintenance, and advanced troubleshooting.

His background includes electrical field leadership, solar business ownership, and technical support engineering at Yaskawa Solectria Solar.

Today, Lee is co-founder of RE:BOOT Operations LLC, where he focuses on field diagnostics, inverter systems, commissioning, and root-cause analysis to improve solar asset reliability and performance.