Volunteer Spotlight: Kurt Rhee

GRID GLA Volunteer Kurt Rhee wanted share his experience with the GRID family and how it has helped him get on his current career path. With his permission, we have excerpted a portion here:         

My name is Kurt Rhee and I am a PV Systems Design Supervisor for Sunrun.  I’ve been working in the solar industry now for about a year.  My day to day involves driving efficiency for a team of 11 PV Systems Designers and participating in tool and process updates for the company. 

I’m writing this testimonial because Grid Alternatives astounds me.  Grid Alternatives is a group of people that have been with me, driving my growth, since before I even knew that the solar industry was exactly what I wanted to get into. 

In my junior year at UCSD, while pursuing a degree in Nano-engineering, I volunteered for Grid a number of times out of both curiosity and a desire to help the environment.  These experiences were transformative, in that they cemented my interest in renewable energies and focused my scattered studies onto photovoltaics.  A year later, during my interview for the PV Systems Designer position, I was able to talk about my experience installing systems with Grid and I was hired at Sunrun. 

As a designer at Sunrun, I was tasked with piloting the process for design with Enphase micro-inverters.   It was fortunate that two of the systems that I had installed with Grid were both Enphase systems.  Physical hands on experience helped me get selected for the role, and also helped me to understand the concepts of micro-inverter design much faster. Eventually, as a Senior PV Designer for Sunrun, Grid Alternatives helped me set up continued education training for PV designers on my team, which I hope will be as beneficial to them as it was for me.  I hope that each of these installs will impart on them a greater understanding for design concepts, as well as a greater appreciation for our mission, which is to create a planet run by the sun. 

My many thanks go out to Grid for helping me to further my career, and for helping create a better planet.   22,353 kW installed, 492,644 tons of greenhouse gas emissions prevented, 94,088 cars off the road for a year, 25,212 volunteers trained!  Keep up the good work.  Hope to see you all out in the field.

- Kurt Rhee