Team Spotlight: Catherine Von Burg, Board Member
Please join us in welcoming our newest board member, Catherine Von Burg!
Catherine Von Burg is an entrepreneur, advisor, public speaker, impact investor, founder, and former CEO & President of SimpliPhi Power, Inc., a startup she pioneered and led to exponential growth and a successful acquisition in 2021 by private equity KPS Capital. After facilitating integration with other KPS portfolio companies, Catherine exited in 2023 in pursuit of her next venture, advising and investing in other cleantech companies at the forefront of the energy transition.
SimpliPhi, a California mission-based technology company, was the first U.S. based manufacturer to innovate and engineer safe, efficient, non-cobalt lithium-ion energy storage and management solutions to seamlessly optimize solar, wind, generator, and grid power for residential, commercial, military, and emergency response markets – both on and off-grid. Under Catherine's leadership, SimpliPhi executed on an integrated bottom line (people, planet, profit), joined the UN Global Compact, and established a philanthropic division dedicating 1% of revenue every year to high impact renewable energy infrastructure projects globally. The company deployed clean tech energy solutions in over 40 countries in partnership with governments, utilities, NGO's, and other equipment manufacturers, providing access to power in some of the harshest, most remote environments and use-cases worldwide.
Catherine's career spans a diverse portfolio of strategic planning, policy development, executive leadership, and multidisciplinary team building in the fields of biomedical engineering & research, health & human services, sustainability, technology, and environmental conservation. Catherine is committed to transforming the power grid and creating equitable, universal access to clean energy through distributed energy storage solutions. She has published white papers and spearheaded national program, policy, business-driven, and nonprofit initiatives with organizations including Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Institute, Columbia University, the March of Dimes Foundation, Johns Hopkins School of Biomedical Engineering, the Wilderness Education Association, and the First 5 Commission of California.
Catherine graduated from Columbia University in New York and holds a Master’s degree from The University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Policy.
Take us back to the beginning. What's the moment or experience that first drew your attention to energy access during crises?
First, I would ask, define crisis? Is it only in the final moments of an event characterized as a crisis? Or is it in the moment-to-moment lead-up to that event, the culmination of a slow burn with successive crises over years of government and corporate malfeasance, neglect, poverty, discrimination, and environmental degradation?
Having grown up, attended school, and travelled in both the US and overseas, I was exposed to other cultures, belief systems, and traditions from an early age. And yet, a common theme that cut across all my experiences, regardless of country, was the seemingly incongruous disparity that existed between people and communities simply because they lacked access to the resources that created opportunities and privileges that others possessed - and often took for granted. A month-long trip to India in college with my anthropology professor brought clarity to this idea of just how critical the distribution of resources is in determining the well-being and trajectory of a person, a community – as well as the cultural, socioeconomic, religious, ethnic, gender, and geopolitical beliefs and practices that determine the inequitable / equitable distribution of those resources – particularly energy. The nexus of energy, water, and food and how the lack of access creates successive crises with worsening outcomes over time.
Standing in the middle of a large room witnessing abandoned infants in makeshift cribs made from fruit crates and boxes suffering through various stages of exposure, starvation, and dehydration felt like a crisis – and a failure to equitably distribute critical resources to a community marginalized by its own government and cultural beliefs. By contrast, I also witnessed how the introduction of energy to rural, marginalized communities reversed the plight of those infants and their families. The transformative impact of renewable energy was evident in the creation of irrigation systems energized to irrigate crops, in the capacity to pump and filter clean drinking water, and the ability to provide basic lighting in schools, clinics, and homes. The financial relief alone, created by solar generation eliminating the constant transport and resupply of diesel fuel for generators, created opportunities for economic investment back into the community that otherwise would have been guzzled up by generators and dissipated into the air through toxic fumes.
Did that same pattern show up anywhere in the United States?
It did. You don’t have to travel to India to witness the slow burn of a crisis in the making, with multiple crises along the way. Living in Pontiac Detroit, other cities and rural towns in the US as a kid, I witnessed the same moment-to-moment crises smoldering below the surface. Catastrophic disasters, whether due to conflict or climate, are rarely isolated, one-off events. As I have experienced them, they are moments on a continuum, with systemic root causes at one end of the spectrum, with progressively worse outcomes over time on the other end - ad infinitum - if those fundamental root causes are not addressed. Living in California and experiencing ever-worsening extreme heat, drought, and wind – root causes - and the worsening catastrophic fires over time, is an example of this continuum. Access to renewable energy is critical to addressing both the root cause of extreme weather events - ever rising CO2 emissions - whether they are fires, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, or droughts, as well as the moment-to-moment crises over time in the lead-up to what becomes characterized as a catastrophic crisis.
A core objective for me has always been about addressing root causes, as well as the continuum of successive worsening outcomes that culminate in a catastrophic event, in the hope of having an impact that both slows the progression and ultimately eliminates the root cause(s).
SimpliPhi's batteries ended up in some of the toughest places imaginable: forward operating bases, disaster zones, remote communities cut off from power. Is there one deployment story that's stayed with you?
SimpliPhi Power designed, manufactured, and deployed energy storage systems that ranged from small portable plug-and-play consumer products to larger stationary residential and commercial installations, both grid-tied and off-grid. Though there were some large commercial installations that were innovative both in engineering designs and use-case scenarios, it was often the smaller scale deployments that had an outsized impact that really meant a lot to me and the team. In 2018 we delivered a turn-key containerized, solar-powered nanogrid to Princess Margaret Hospital in Roseau, Dominica, to provide mission-critical resilience for disaster recovery and hurricane preparedness following Hurricane Maria. The project represented the power of building partnerships with other for-profit, nonprofit, and government organizations to deliver resources in underserved communities ravaged by an ecological disaster. Footprint Project is inspiring in this regard - bringing together people and resources from different organizations to facilitate response and recovery efforts for communities in crisis.
What pulled you toward Footprint Project specifically? Was there a moment that made you say, "I want to be part of this"?
Approximately 6 p.m. Monday, December 4, 2017, the Thomas Fire erupted when SCE powerlines came into contact and exploded in an electrical arc due to extreme wind, heat and drought in ‘upper’ Ojai, the town where the company I founded, SimpliPhi Power, Inc., was located. Ojai, a small town in the hills above Ventura, is flanked by the towering TopaTopa and Nordhoff Ridge mountains to the north, and the Sulphur and Lower Black mountains to the South. By 10 p.m. that same night, the fire had destroyed a SCE power plant, knocking out power to some 100,000 residents. As of Tuesday, the town was issued a boil-water and hazardous air warning and was blanketed in smoke and falling ash.
The only power sources available in town came from the hundreds of fuel-based generators being used by residents, adding to the toxic pollution and noise of the blaze itself. By 9 a.m. Wednesday, December 6, the town of Ojai was surrounded by fire along the mountain ridges, causing a rapid mandatory evacuation to be ordered for the entire town. Though we shut down our headquarters and manufacturing operations as of Monday, making calls before the power was knocked out that night, I remained in town until Thursday morning. Footprint Project’s mission to both respond to and re-build communities devastated by ecological disasters with sustainable renewable power generation and storage became all the more imperative for me after experiencing the deleterious impact of all those fuel-based generators in Ojai and the successive towns I evacuated from as the Thomas fire continued to spread through the week.
Catherine Von Burg joins Footprint Project's board following a career spent proving that clean, resilient power isn't a luxury for the communities that need it most. It's the difference between a crisis that compounds and one that doesn't.
