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🔦 Project Manager Spotlight: Meet Alexa Daly | Since 2018, Alexa has helped shape Pure Power’s growth from a team of 18 to over 130+ in-house engineers. With hundreds of solar projects under her belt and deep experience navigating AHJ and utility nuances across the country, Alexa represents what sets Pure Power apart: Project Managers who know how to design for speed, scale, and approval the first time. Hear how Alexa and our in-house PMs keep projects moving—despite changing equipment, evolving utility requirements, and complex permitting environments.
Transcription:
My name is Alexa Daly. I'm a project manager and I've been here for seven years now since 2018. Wow. 2018. That's a long time. Tell me about some of the changes to pure Power and what has it been like? So when I started I was the first woman engineer at the company. I think I was like number 18 in the company total. So it's grown quite a bit since I've been here. It's been great to kind of learn and grow with the company over the last seven years. So tell me about some of the changes to the engineering to the industry itself if you could. So it's constantly changing. Equipment is changing. Requirements are changing. Technology is getting more advanced. So we have to kind of evolve our designs to match those changes and sometimes they happen super quickly. So we have a template team in-house that kind of makes changes to our design standards to account for the industry. Why don't you speak a little bit about the portfolios you've been involved with and some of the projects and the different types? So the largest portfolio I've personally managed is 55 projects that have somewhere between 500 and 900 kW AC ranging commercial rooftop solar projects. It took us probably two months to get through all of themn but depending on the size and quantity of the projects our timeline varies. You’ve got all of these projects going on at one time. Five, ten, fifteen projects that you're handling with your team on the day to day. How do you manage these projects simultaneously? So I'd say the biggest challenge for managing a lot of projects at once is the varying utility requirements and varying AHJ requirements across different states different cities. So you can have 20 different projects in 20 different cities with 20 different requirements that need to be met for interconnection approval. So the biggest thing for us is to kind of do a lot of due diligence upfront to ensure that we get a baseline of design so that we know utility requirements and we kind of have a good first draft of the project before it goes through any sort of review. We talk about some of like these utility requirements. Can you list me off a couple? That could really be detrimental to a project that maybe some other firms miss. That pure power doesn't. So it really varies depending on the utility but a lot of times we'll see effective grounding needed for projects over a certain size or you get all the way through utility interconnection and then you hear back in the utility that they only upgrade transformers up to a certain size which is not your system size. So little nuances like that that are completely different across the board can greatly affect a project. One thing that Pure Power does really well is we have an internal database of all of our projects sorted by utility, sorted by city. That kind of gives the project manager a baseline design to kind of reference for a project in that similar area with a similar system size. What that provides is a great resource for knowledge sharing because there's been a project manager at Pure Power that has likely gone through the utility and the city nuances and knows what to expect before it goes through to the utility.
