Participant Overview

Sunil Cherian

Sunil Cherian is the founder and CEO of Spirae, Inc. based in Fort Collins, Colorado. Spirae develops infrastructure solutions for distributed energy and smart grid applications and co-owns and operates the InteGrid Test and Development Laboratory in collaboration with Colorado State University.

Prior to Spirae, Dr. Cherian founded Sixth Dimension, Inc. for providing networking technologies for the energy industry and served as its CEO from 1997 until 2002. Sixth Dimension was acquired by Comverge in 2003. Before beginning his entrepreneurial activities, Dr. Cherian served as Acting Director for the Colorado Manufacturing Extension Center and as Product Realization specialist for the Mid America Manufacturing Extension Center, both at Colorado State University.

Dr. Cherian has extensive experience in distributed energy applications including renewables integration, aggregated distributed generation for peak shaving, wholesale trading, and congestion management; load aggregation and workflow management for demand response; and service delivery infrastructures for Energy Service Providers. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and workshops and has been actively involved in the creation of the GridWise Alliance that promotes the adoption of innovative IT solutions for the transformation of the electric power system as envisioned by the US DOE. He also serves on the Board of the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Cluster.

He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from CSU in 1991 and 1995 respectively. He has over fifteen publications in journals, conference and workshop proceedings, and has authored book chapters on software agent technologies and distributed generation.

Participating In:

Smart Grid Benefits Panel Discussion Presenter