I've worked on both sides of the table. Now I work for owners.

Miles brings about fifteen years across energy research, utility programs and field deployment, with engineering roles at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), E Source, Michaels Energy, Iconergy, CLEAResult and a publicly traded national ESCO.

At Michaels Energy he designed, built, launched and managed the City of Denver's Commercial and Multi-Family Building Electrification program, including the electrification feasibility report and the equipment rebates. He built the electrification feasibility model the city now uses in its building energy codes and permitting.

At CLEAResult he led more than one hundred investment grade and ASHRAE Level 2 assessments and dozens of retro-commissioning studies. At E Source he answered more than 200 research requests for utilities across North America. At NREL he led the Advanced Space Conditioning Technical Research Team.

He is a two-time company founder and a community energy organizer with one conviction: the clean-energy transition should be delivered as one integrated, repeatable system, not reinvented project by project.

Every building I've worked on gets solved from scratch: the same problems, re-engineered a hundred times over. Applied Energy Intelligence is building the system that makes decarbonization accessible and scalable, and brings climate budgets back to building owners so projects actually get built. That's the work I wanted to be doing.

At the national lab

As a Research Engineer III at NREL (2018 to 2020), Miles led the Advanced Space Conditioning Technical Research Team, working to remove market barriers for high-impact HVAC technologies:

• Thermal energy storage subject matter expert and lead author of a state-of-the-art review of cooling storage for commercial buildings
• RTU automated fault detection and diagnostics field study, co-led with data partners across retail, fitness and BAS vendors
• Close-out lead for DOE's Advanced RTU Campaign, which reported 161,950 high-efficiency RTUs and 1.1 billion kWh a year saved campaign-wide
• Developed the HVAC Resource Map website, including its laboratory systems update, and supported the FY20 HIT Catalyst work plan for DOE's Commercial Building Integration program
• Inverter-driven, variable-speed cold-climate heat pumps and grid-interactive electrification

City of Golden: Roadmap to Net Zero Buildings

In 2022 Miles was lead project engineer for the consultant team, Iconergy with Lotus Engineering and Sustainability, hired by the City of Golden. The team ran the Energy Code Stakeholder Group, a panel of planning commissioners, sustainability board members, homeowners, landlords, contractors and city staff, through four workshops from January to July 2022.

Miles wrote the resulting Roadmap to Net Zero Buildings (August 2022): a five-year plan covering new construction codes, benchmarking and a building performance standard for existing buildings, code trigger and incentive gaps, and funding mechanisms. Golden adopted updated energy codes in July 2025.

City of Golden project page | Stakeholder workshop recording, May 12, 2022

How we work

• People first. We treat facility staff as partners. The people who run a building know it best, and we leave them more confident than we found them.
• Conscience over commission. We recommend what's right for your building, not what pays us best.
• Rebates belong to owners. We price at or under available incentives whenever we can.
• Creative and bottom-line driven. We look for the unconventional fix, then prove it pays.
• Plain language. You'll understand every number in our reports.
• The climate is a client too. Every project is measured in carbon as well as dollars.

Expertise

• ASHRAE Level 1, 2 and 3 audits and investment grade audits
• Energy savings performance contracting, guaranteed savings modeling and IPMVP M&V
• HVAC and DHW electrification, cold-climate heat pumps and VRF
• BAS and DDC controls, retro-commissioning and fault detection
• Thermal energy storage and grid-interactive buildings
• Energy modeling: TRM, bin and 8,760-hour, OpenStudio
• Utility DSM, demand response and DER program design
• Industrial engineering, lean and Six Sigma
• Utility program research across HVAC, heat pumps, ventilation, motors, envelope, water heating and EVs (E Source)
• Automated fault detection and diagnostics for rooftop units
• AI-driven workflow and analysis tools

Publications and talks

• Cold-climate heat pumps are ready to bolster your decarbonization efforts, E Source, September 2021 (with Liza Minor)
• From the lab to the field: Are US cold-climate air-source heat pumps ready for the mainstream?, E Source Forum 2021 (with Josh Quinnell)
• New greenhouse gas controls for dual-fuel heating, E Source technology research update
• Denver Commercial and Multifamily Electrification: Lessons from the Field, December 2023
• Long and Winding Road to Higher Efficiency: The RTU Story, 2020 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, NREL/CP-5500-77092 (with Michael Deru, Katie Vrabel, Carly Burke, Amy Jiron and Cedar Blazek)
• Thermal Energy Storage for Space Cooling: state-of-the-art review, NREL, 2019 (with Marcus Bianchi)
• Thermal Energy Storage: The Lowest Cost Storage, DOE Better Buildings webinar, 2019
• Electrification Execution, UC Davis speaker series
• KAUST Visualization Core Lab, project feature

Community energy

• Winneshiek Energy District, co-founder. The original Iowa energy district, founded in 2010 to lead a locally owned clean energy transition
• Howard County Energy District, founder
• Decorah Power, helped start the nonprofit and develop its municipal electric utility proposal
• Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, co-founder. SILT has protected 16 farms and 1,200 acres for growing healthy food
• Key To Sustainability, founder
• Arvada Sustainability Advisory Committee (2023 to 2026); helped develop and review Arvada's Climate and Sustainability Action Plan, adopted unanimously in July 2026 with targets of 40% lower community emissions by 2030 and 75% by 2050
• AESP member and Switch Colorado speaker on commercial building electrification
• Project Lead the Way and middle school football coach

Partners

For design and engineering, we partner with ETHOS, a Colorado engineering design firm. Together we take projects from audit to stamped construction documents.

Education

B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University.