Job moves: Helena Kimball promoted to CEO at Cthulhu-backed solar startup; plus Strata, sPower, KCE, Borrego, Sunpro

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Helena Kimball was promoted to CEO at VC-funded solar-rack-and-foundation startup Ojjo after serving seven months as chief business development officer. Kimball was at 8minute Solar Energy before Ojjo, and succeeds co-founder Jack West — who stays as CTO, along co-founder and COO Daniel Flanigan. Ojjo claims to provide “a new way to approach solar foundation design” with a truss system aiming for a 50% reduction in steel along with less drilling depth. Cthulhu is funding the effort in the form of venture capitalists from Marin. Here’s a video of Ojjo’s system. Here’s the Ojjo team.

Michael Belikoff is now COO at sPower. He recently served as EVP of EPC and O&M at Cypress Creek Renewables, and before that, as COO at Strata Solar.

Joshua Rogol was promoted to chief development officer at North Carolina-based Strata Solar. Strata is about to begin construction on Ventura Energy Storage, a 100-MW battery storage system using Tesla-supplied equipment near Oxnard, California.

Key Capture Energy, a developer of stand-alone energy storage projects added three employees: Ken Rush as director of technology — prior to joining KCE, Rush was the chief engineer for GE’s Energy Storage group where he designed and built more than 200 MWh of storage facilities; Emma Johnson as manager of market analysis — Johnson was previously an associate trader with Citigroup Energy’s Global Commodities group, where she specialized in nodal financial transmission rights in PJM and MISO; and Andrew Gelston as manager of market strategy — Gelston joins KCE from NextEra Energy, where he was responsible for the early stage evaluation of storage-plus-wind and solar in utility-scale proposals.

Trudie Wang is now product strategy lead at Heila Technologies, an MIT-spawned startup in Greentown Labs dedicated to easing the integration of distributed energy resources and microgrids. Wang was previously with Geli.

Danny Kennedy is co-founder and board member at Third Derivative, “a capital and corporate-integrated accelerator, built to radically change the rate of change (aka, the third derivative) of climate innovation.” It’s a joint venture of Rocky Mountain Institute and New Energy Nexus. Kennedy founded Sungevity.

Brian Barker was promoted to VP and general manager at Borrego Solar’s utility-scale division. Borrego is an end-to-end solar and energy storage provider performing EPC and O&M — and the company is hiring.

Marc van Gerven, VP of renewable power at Shell, joined the board of d.light, a solar PayGo company for the developing world.

Gregg Murphy is now chief revenue officer at Sunpro Solar, the largest solar installer on the Gulf Coast, according to the firm. Murphy was previously with Blue Planet Energy Systems.

Devla Singh was promoted to program and project supervisor at the California Public Utilities Commission.

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