Faces of Ava: The Curious Mind of Diego Ponce de Leon Barido

Our Head of Technology and Analytics, Diego Ponce de Leon Barido, is an innovator in energy, sustainability science, and data, bringing a breadth of international experience to Ava. Now he is applying his curious mind to help make Ava a clean energy innovator.

As Diego Ponce de Léon Barido has traveled the world, he has always brought his curiosity with him. 

With a background in engineering and economics, including a PhD from UC Berkeley focused on using data to enable energy transitions, Diego has worked across Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  Now he has brought his skills and vision to Ava.

Youth and College

Growing up in Mexico City, Diego was interested in working internationally from an early age. In high school he studied the impact of NAFTA on small farmers, spending summers with farmers in rural Oaxaca.  

“That research got me thinking about economics and engineering and how they affect people’s lives,” he says.

He finished high school at an international school in Wales before going to Minnesota for college, earning a BA in economics at Macalester College and a BS in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Minnesota.

During college, his interest in infrastructure for energy and sustainable development bloomed. He spent semesters working in Uganda, Honduras, and Chiapas, Mexico with Engineers Without Borders and MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, helping to design and build microgrids for rural off-grid communities and small-scale water distribution, as well as new incentive and payment schemes through microfinance. After graduation, Diego had a brief stint in finance, before taking a job with the Institute for the Environment at University of Minnesota evaluating the impact of drought on energy systems in India.

UC Berkeley and Beyond

He continued his international focus at UC Berkeley, earning a master’s degree and PhD from the Energy and Resources Group in 2017. At Cal, Diego developed optimization models for long-term energy planning, data science, and wireless sensor networks for smart grid deployment in Central America and East Africa. His work was used by the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) to guide renewable energy investments in Central America and by the IBM Smart Cities Lab in Kenya to consider tradeoffs between grid expansion and off-grid energy services.  

During his time at UC Berkeley, Diego won awards including a National Geographic Energy Challenge Grant (becoming a National Geographic Explorer), an IDB  Energy IDEAS Grant, and funding from US agencies for research on the “future of the smart grid” in emerging economies. 

That included support for Latin America’s first flexible demand pilot, where 100 low- and middle-income households in Nicaragua enrolled their appliances to be controlled to support grid operations. He and his team designed the wireless sensor networks, cloud infrastructure, and forecasting algorithms. The project won second place in an energy innovation and equity competition from the IDB.

Ponce de Leon holding the FlexBox, a Wireless Sensor Network that turned everyday appliances into flexible loads depending on market and renewable energy availability conditions. Lake Cocibolca, Nicaragua  (Source: National Geographic)

Xinampa

Diego spun this work on data and sustainable development into a company, Xinampa.  The company initially focused on wireless sensor networks for flexible loads, but Diego soon realized that the service was ahead of its time. “That kind of thing is just coming of age now,” he says. “There was no market for it at the time in Latin America.” 

Xinampa quickly pivoted to energy data services for utilities in Central America, South America, and the Philippines, building software products. It was contracted by several multinational agencies and institutions including the US Department of Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and several governments across the region. Xinampa studied the energy use of air conditioning in some of the hottest regions in Mexico, under contract with the US Agency for International Development (AID). 

This led to later work with the local government in Mexico City to develop software to track air conditioning use and efficiency across government buildings. The mayor at the time was Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, who had been a researcher at Berkeley Lab for four years in the 1990s, studying energy use in Mexico’s transportation and building sectors.

Sheinbaum was recently elected president of Mexico. “I’d love to bring her back on a tour to develop some new partnerships with California based agencies,” he says.

The Data Observatory

Xinampa also won prizes that helped fund non-profit activities, like OBDIJA, a “digital observatory for environmental justice.” OBDIJA is a multi-layered map that combines spatial data, real time news feeds and chatbots using natural language processing to monitor environmental justice issues from Mexico through the Northern Amazon. Data is provided from government sources, as well as crowd-sourced from community and non-profit organizations, who can use WhatsApp and Facebook to report directly to it. It also uses bots to pull from news and social media specific to locations and issues, such as oil spills or the murders of environmental activists — a frighteningly common occurrence in Latin America.

The tool is intended to foster “evidencia, colaboración e investigación” — evidence, collaboration, and investigation — of wrongdoing.  “NGOs use it to track environmental grievances that are happening on the ground,” Diego says.

The data observatory showing industrial sites north of Mexico City. (Source: OBDIJA)

A key part of Xinampa’s goal was  to make data usable and actionable, especially by people who are not necessarily data-fluent. “Everyone wants data,” he told TechSoup in a 2019 interview, “but they don’t know how to use it.”

OBDIJA also had an impact on US policy, influencing the Biden administration’s Justice40 environmental justice initiative. The White House reached out to Diego to learn about OBDIJA’s development and impact. “It was featured in a memo to Gina McCarthy, the head of EPA,” Diego recalls, and helped contribute to the Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool, which helps direct funding for clean energy projects and climate investments to disadvantaged communities.

Coming to Ava

Although Xinampa was always profitable, Diego was unable to raise the money to scale it up. “Mexican VCs didn’t fund it because they didn’t see the value of energy data and AI, and US VCs thought it was too risky to invest in Latin America,” he says. A job opening at Ava Community Energy allowed him to continue working on the energy data projects he cared about.

“Ava’s sustainability mission attracted me,” he says. “It seemed like the ideal place for me to put my skills to practice.”

“All my past work was to develop data so people could take action on sustainability,” he says. “But I always had to explain the value of data, and the value of clean energy. Now it is a no-brainer.”

“Plus, emissions per-capita here are far greater than the countries I was working in,” he adds. “We need to make the energy transition happen for the economy and environment and long term sustainability.” 

He now serves as the Head of Technology and Analytics for Ava, applying his data skills to a suite of distributed energy projects, like managed electric vehicle charging, solar+storage installations, and Health-E Communities.

That includes partnering with startups to use their tech and data to help with Ava’s goals. But learning from his past, he prefers to take things in-house with his data team as much as possible. “Startups tend to get acquired and their projects change or get shut down,” he says. “So we are building our own infrastructure — software, APIs, models and machine learning tools– to better provide services.”

While his own startup, Xinampa, is on hold, it hasn’t disappeared. OBDIJA continues to function as a crowd-sourced platform.

“I enjoy working at Ava because the people here care about their work,” he says.  “It’s a small organization that packs a punch with its ambition and impact to meet long term sustainability goals.”