Russell Wilcox is a seasoned NABCEP certified renewable energy professional with 10 years of solar construction and development experience. Since his founding of Urban Energy in 2017, he has turned an urban commercial solar contractor with $300k in annual revenue into a vertically integrated electrification developer, innovative EPC firm, and technology provider with over $10 million in projected revenue for 2023.

In 2021 he designed a first-of-its-kind Solar Canopy racking attachment method suitable for mass deployment on load-constrained urban multifamily rooftops; the design has been validated by third-party structural engineering partners and approved by the Department of Buildings of NYC. As part of this solar racking innovation, he created a sophisticated PVSyst adder methodology for simulating bifacial gains on solar canopies with reflective roofs which has been validated by an Independent Engineer (IE); the methodology used to justify a 15% bifacial adder to underwrite solar project financing for projects with this new canopy innovation. He was a recipient of NREL’s American Made Solar Prize Round 4 Ready! and Set! grant to advance Solar Canopy commercialization, which included $150K in non-dilutive funding and $75K in vouchers at Sandia Labs.

Russell has participated in the NYSERDA-funded Scale for Climate Tech program to prepare the Solar Canopy for manufacturing readiness. He has also been a member of the Urban Future Lab as a company and a personal mentor for Clean Start participants. Lastly, he is one of the cofounders of the networking organization the DER Task Force, acting as the producer of the DER Task Force podcast and is a core energy influencer in the growing distributed energy movement.