← About Pilot

Our team

Forty energy advocates.
One job.

Pilot's team is organized around the work — solution areas with senior leads, market specialists who know their ISOs deeply, industry experts who translate procurement decisions into operational impact. The engagement model decides who's in the driver's seat. The team makes the work happen.

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Ricky Hopp Ricky Hopp
Erin Schmerschneider Erin Schmerschneider
Dave Hennekes Dave Hennekes
Kevin Sangudi Kevin Sangudi
Tom Foster Tom Foster

Forty advocates.
One job.
Sitting on the buyer's side of the table.

Jennifer Ford Jennifer Ford

How the team is structured

Organized around the work, not by hierarchy.

Each of Pilot's five core solutions has a dedicated team lead and senior advocate bench. Market specialists overlay the teams — an ISO-NE capacity expert works across procurement, load management, and decarbonization engagements within ISO-NE rather than being siloed to one solution area. The result is a team that knows both the work AND the market that the work happens in.

01

Procurement & Risk Management

Senior advocates running power and gas sourcing across every U.S. deregulated market. Hedging strategists, contract specialists, RFP execution leads. The largest team because procurement is the foundation of most engagements.

Includes: Team lead, regional procurement specialists, hedging strategist, contract administration.

02

Direct Access & Wholesale

CAISO Direct Access specialists going back to Pilot's founding in 2001. Now extended through the Viasyn acquisition to include Scheduling Coordinator capabilities — Pilot operates directly in wholesale markets on behalf of clients rather than working through intermediaries.

Includes: Direct Access team lead, CAISO scheduling coordinators, wholesale market analysts, regulatory specialists.

03

Utility Invoice Verification & Tariff Analysis

Audit specialists who go line-by-line through utility invoices against the contracts and tariffs that govern them. The function that uncovers what large multi-site portfolios miss when 200 invoices arrive each month.

Includes: Team lead, multi-state tariff specialists, audit analysts, refund recovery specialists.

04

Load Management

Demand response operators, capacity-tag management specialists, BTM advisory leads. The team that turns operational flexibility into revenue rather than cost — particularly on 5CP management in PJM and capacity auction participation across markets.

Includes: Team lead, DR program managers, capacity market analysts, BTM advisory specialists.

05

Decarbonization & Renewables

PPA structuring specialists, REC procurement, Scope 2 reporting support. The team that turns multi-year sustainability commitments into actual contracts with developer counterparties.

Includes: Team lead, PPA structuring specialists, REC market analysts, reporting framework specialists.

06

Community Choice Aggregation

Formerly Trebel Energy, now Pilot's CCA team. Public sector specialists who have supported municipal aggregators across Ohio since the program's earliest implementations — now applied to municipal aggregation work across PJM and adjacent jurisdictions.

Includes: Team lead, municipal aggregation specialists, public sector engagement leads, regulatory counsel.

07

Operations & Platform

The PowerUp platform team plus operations leads supporting all client engagements. Includes the data engineers, analysts, and client success advocates who make the multi-solution coordination actually work day-to-day.

Includes: Platform engineering, data analytics, client operations, account management.

Experience

The bench is deep.

Pilot's senior advocates average more than fifteen years of industry experience. That depth matters because energy procurement is one of those professions where scar tissue is part of the qualification: someone who has watched a capacity market clear at the price cap, lived through a polar vortex pricing event, navigated a supplier bankruptcy, and worked a renewal cycle through three regulatory regimes knows things that can't be taught from scratch.

15+
Average years of experience among senior advocates
25
Years Pilot has been continuously operating
40
Energy advocates on the team
6
Solution areas plus operations & platform

Senior advocates on the procurement team have run programs through the 2008 commodity supercycle, the shale boom, the 2014 polar vortex, the 2020 pandemic shock, Winter Storm Uri, and the ongoing capacity tightening. The market changes; the experience compounds.

What unites the team

Three working principles.

Pilot's culture isn't ornamental — it's how the work gets done. Three working principles guide how advocates engage with clients, with each other, and with the markets they navigate.

01

Steadfast.

Markets shift. Regulations change. Suppliers come and go. Energy advocates assigned to a client account stay assigned — the institutional memory of every renewal, every contract negotiation, every operational decision compounds. Clients don't re-explain their situation every year.

02

Purposefully clear.

Energy markets are genuinely complicated. Procurement decisions involve hundreds of variables. Pilot's job is to translate that complexity into language that makes the trade-offs explicit and the decision defensible — not to dress up the decision in jargon that obscures what's actually being chosen.

03

Quietly bold.

The right procurement strategy is sometimes the contrarian one. The right hedge is sometimes uncomfortable. The right time to lock in pricing is sometimes when the market is most volatile. Pilot's advocates make the calls the data supports — and explain them in a way that holds up to board-level scrutiny.

Where the team works from

San Diego HQ. National coverage.

Pilot's headquarters are in San Diego, California — appropriate to the firm's CAISO Direct Access origins. The team works from there and from regional presence across the U.S., matched to where Pilot's largest solution areas operate.

Market specialists are positioned in the regions whose ISOs they cover: PJM, ERCOT, NYISO, ISO-NE, and MISO each have advocates whose primary focus is that market's specific structure, auction cycles, and regulatory dockets. CAISO specialists run from the West Coast. Most engagements run as multi-disciplinary teams that combine solution depth with market depth on whatever the client's situation requires.

Meet the leadership

Want to meet a team lead?

Each solution area has a senior lead who runs that area of the firm. The fastest path to a substantive conversation is through our contact form — we'll route you to the lead most relevant to your situation and have you in front of the right person within one business day.

Talk to a team lead → See open roles →