Miles is a cleantech innovator and equity champion who has spent his 7-year career wearing various hats in commercial solar development: business development, project finance, project design, and risk management. He has been involved in derisking every stage of solar project development giving him an expansive toolkit of best practices. Miles noticed early on that solar is not as sustainable as it is made out to be. During his time at leading commercial solar developers and IPPs such as Sol Systems, Goldman Sachs Renewable Power, and Summit Ridge Energy, he witnessed first-hand the inefficiencies and inequalities of traditional solar development.
The development process was constantly delayed because of county and landowner resistance to disruption to their communities. Miles launched Okovate Sustainable Energy because he envisions a world where expediated solar deployment and agriculture communities can thrive harmoniously. Okovate develops these projects in-house and consults with asset owners and developers that desire to implement agrivoltaics, the co-location of solar and agriculture.
When he's not leading the OSE team, Miles is a is a Doodle Dad and board member of the Colorado Agrivoltaics Learning Center (CALC), and a Senior Advisor at Black Oak Collective - a nonprofit that he co-founded that boasts a network of over 450 Black students, professionals and advocates in the sustainability space. Miles graduated from the University of Virginia as a Rodman Scholar with a B.S. in Environmental Science and a minor in Engineering Business. He also has a certificate in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy from Yale Center of Business and Environment (CBEY).