Senior Director, Utility Strategy and Market Design

The Role Following Madison’s groundbreaking Community Infrastructure announcement to develop 1 GW and mobilize up to $2 billion in capital, we are hiring a leader to own MEI’s relationships with utilities, ISOs/RTOs, and state utility regulators. This person will be critical in helping MEI shape the market rules and utility programs that determine whether distributed storage and solar can be interconnected, accredited, and compensated at the massive scale our plan requires. This person will own MEI’s influence in those proceedings — identifying which rules actually matter to our thesis, deciding where our effort is best spent, and working directly with utilities and commission staff to craft programs that work for the utility, the Digital Infrastructure Partners, the community, and MEI at the same time. This is a utility- and regulator-facing role, not a legislative one. A separate hire will own policy and government relations — legislative advocacy, executive branch engagement, and trade association strategy. The external counterparts for this role are the utility resource planner, the distribution engineer, the DER program manager, the commission staffer, and the ISO stakeholder committee: the people who design programs and write rules.

The two roles will coordinate closely, but the mandate here is technical, program-level, and commercial. This person will own MEI’s assessment of market and interconnection viability — verifying that the ISO, RTO, and utility will allow us to interconnect and provide capacity in a given location, now or on a known timeline, and building the path to change that where they will not. That assessment directly determines where MEI commits development capital, so the rigor and honesty of this work matters. This role is ideal for someone who understands how utilities and their regulators make decisions — who has worked inside a rate case, a distribution plan, or a DER program design — and is ready to apply that experience directly. Credibility with utility and commission counterparts, and sound judgment about where to focus effort, are the core assets.