Eric Dresselhuys, Executive Vice President, Silver Spring Networks

Eric Dresselhuys

What makes him powerful: Since 1997, Dresselhuys has worked to take the smart grid from concept to reality, seeing both success and failure, but always remaining a tireless advocate to change the world's relationship with energy.

He has been advocating for the smart grid for more than 13 years, having served on the boards of the Demand Response and Smart Grid Collation and the Automatic Meter Reading Association's (AMRA) Marketing and Development Committee, and well as being a founding member of OpenVMS, to drive this vision.

Dresselhuys has been advocating for the use of open standards to drive interoperability since 2003 -- five years before this became codified as standard practice by the efforts at NIST.  Driving open standards has helped to create hundreds of new companies that can build cutting edge solutions adding value to the smart grid, lowering the costs of solutions, and empowering utilities and consumers to move faster than ever before.

In 2005, Dresselhuys advocated for electric vehicle infrastructure as a critical component of the smart grid vision and has helped lead the implementation of moicro-grid applications to speed today's conversion to clean energy.

Dresselhuys has been on the cutting edge of exciting innovations -- such as the 1997 demonstration a smart grid on the distribution network by showing the ability to integrate grid reliability with advanced metering -- that now dominate the global market.

As a renowned industry expert, Dressylhus has participated in hundreds of presentations and served on hundreds of panels on every continent except Antarctica, bringing his expertise to everything from local town hall meetings to major international symposiums. He keeps extremely busy travelling the conference circuit, serving on the board of directors for the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative and carrying out his smart grid vision with Silver Spring Networks where he has worked in various leadership capacities since its founding in 2002.