Joaquin Silva, President and Chief Executive Officer, On-Ramp Wireless

Joaquin Silva

What makes him powerful: After years serving in the United States Air Force, Silva co-founded On-Ramp Wireless in 2008 in order to address the large technology gap for pervasive wide-area wireless in the smart grid and utility automation markets.

Under Silva's leadership, On-Ramp has become an industry pioneer in the smart grid space, obtaining a U.S. Department of Energy grant for below ground monitoring of distribution grid assets. The wireless system developed by Silva covers the 4,000 mile San Diego area with less than 40 data collection access points and can push low-power signals through buildings, even penetrating the ground.

"Think of our technology as a cellular system designed from the ground up to communicate with many devices, and communicate small amounts of information," Silva said in an interview with the San Diego Union Tribune. He added that competing technologies would require thousands of receivers and repeaters to achieve the same coverage at such low power levels, increasing the cost of the network.

For this technology, On-Ramp Wireless was selected as a World Economic Forum 2011 Technology Pioneer and 2011 Bloomberg New Energy Finance Pioneer. Michael Kanellos, editor of Greentech Media, has crowned On-
Ramp "the Qualcomm of the smart grid."

Silva is credited with explaining to the industry the fundamentals of wireless technology and demystifying the various architectures, showing how wireless can be drastically simpler and lower cost than the common knowledge and approaches being considered for the industry today.  His main contribution has been a contrarian approach synthesizing power grid automation, wireless technology and IT tools to drive a better return on investment for the industry.

Silva is a renowned industry expert and frequent panelist and speaker at industry events, including the Networked Grid 2011 and UTC Telecom 2011, where he discussing smart grid applications and the use of wireless technology. Prior to founding On-Ramp Wireless, and co-founding Ostendo Technologies, Silva spent six years leading the wireless and semiconductor franchise of the investment banking firm Montgomery & Co.