Sustainable Design Alumni | Andrea Tosi

Background Andrea received her degree of Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from UT. Later, she decided to pursue a new field that would allow her to explore how sustainable technologies, especially solar energy, have social impacts on our daily lives.

UT Impact As a student of the master’s program she participated in the design of the NexusHaus – a house that participated in DOE’s Solar Decathlon house in Irvine, California in 2015; this project took her on a path of researching how solar panels and green roofs, two technologies in the built environment, could work together as synergetic systems. She also traveled to Japan in the summer of 2015 to study the feasibility of installing renewable energy in remote areas.

Work Impact Upon graduation, she continued her work with Austin Energy’s Electric Vehicles and Emerging Technologies Team, which she started during the last semester of graduate school. Currently, she works as a team lead for designing, installing, and testing grid-scale Energy Storage Systems under the Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (Austin SHINES) project, which integrates solar power, energy storage (batteries), smart inverters, forecasting tools, market signals, advanced communications, and a software optimization platform. Austin SHINES will be a pilot project to enable and promote integrated Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and increase the penetration of solar energy on the grid.