Former EPRI engineer Sunil Chhaya, PhD, joins as Vice President of Market Development & Applications Engineering

Alderbuck Energy, a San Diego-based power infrastructure company building solid-state systems for AI data centers, today announced that Sunil Chhaya, PhD, has joined the company as Vice President of Market Development & Applications Engineering.

Chhaya joins Alderbuck from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), where he spent nearly two decades leading work on grid modernization, distributed energy resource integration, managed charging, vehicle-to-grid, and cybersecurity.

At Alderbuck, Chhaya will lead market development and applications engineering for the company’s integrated power platform, the Nexus Power Unit™ medium-voltage solid-state transformer and the PowerVector AI™ software layer, including predictive diagnostics, distributed energy resource management, and grid-aware orchestration.

"I'm thrilled to be back at the intersection of agentic AI and power electronics, doing what I did thirty years ago in my PhD program, before anyone called it that,” said Chhaya. “I joined Alderbuck because it has a team that has previously commercialized advanced hardware, and because the company understands that power electronics and the intelligence layer must be systemized together. It’s not often a career comes full circle this precisely, and Alderbuck is exactly where I’m excited to close that loop.”

The appointment comes as Alderbuck moves its platform from design into the field. A planned Nexus Power Unit pilot at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, funded through a California Energy Commission initiative with San Diego Gas & Electric, EmeraldAI, and the Good For Others Foundation, is meant to show how medium-voltage solid-state conversion can cut footprint, installation time, and energy losses for high-density AI loads.

As power demand grows more intense and dynamic with AI compute, transport electrification, and distributed resources, Chhaya will help position Alderbuck as the platform that treats power electronics, grid interoperability, and site economics as one system.

About Alderbuck Energy

Founded in 2024 and headquartered in San Diego, with engineering and manufacturing in Dearborn, Michigan, Alderbuck Energy develops solid-state, isolated, bidirectional power control systems that streamline the connection of AI data centers while improving energy efficiency and reducing cost. Its Nexus Power Unit (NPU)™ replaces multiple pieces of conventional electrical equipment, transformers, rectifiers, and inverters with a single, software-enabled platform that converts medium-voltage AC directly into high-voltage DC, reducing footprint, installation time, and energy losses. Companion software PowerVector AI™ monitors and manages energy flows between utilities, batteries, renewables, and customer loads in real time, using AI to optimize performance and flag equipment issues before failures occur. The platform helps customers overcome grid constraints so data center developers do not have to wait years for a utility connection.

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