Bright Employee: Paul Banel, Front End Developer

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We’re proud of the intelligent, passionate, and hardworking people that make up the Bright Power team. Each month, you’ll get a chance to meet one of them, understand how they contribute to the organization, and what makes them excited to come to work every day.

Meet Paul Banel, Front End Developer.

What are some of the things you like most about working at Bright Power?
I like working with bright, like-minded people who care about the impact of their work and who can see beyond the small steps that lead to that impact. It’s great to create software to enable that work and to help find ways to promote energy efficiency and reduce waste on a large scale.

What are some projects and accomplishments you’re most proud of?
One of my early projects was to create custom Microsoft Office software to streamline the process of creating energy audit reports. Now our engineers spend less time writing and more time fixing and improving buildings. In another project, we created a small web application to work with building system designs from an ancient engineering software. That application reduced design time from hours to minutes and allowed us to scale those projects quickly.

What’s something people might not know about you and your role at Bright Power?
I kind of founded Bright Power Boulder, an unofficial outpost. Another software teammate moved here in the summer. I moved to Colorado for running. I train with Run Boulder AC to race anything from 1500 meters on the track to 100 miles in the mountains of Leadville.

When I started at Bright Power I worked with a lot of different people to solve their random problems and created process improvements that have saved hours of work and are still used today. I aim to reduce waste in all aspects and I love using data and scripts to do that.

You work remotely in Colorado. How do you stay connected to folks in the NY and CA offices?
I started working for Bright Power in the New York office and was there for a little over a year before I moved, so having those relationships helps. We use Slack and it allows me to stay in the loop. I can find the information I need to easily and if I need to reach out to people, they are there. It’s almost like being in the office with them and Slack is fun to use. 

What’s the one service offering we have that you think is the most beneficial to clients and why?
I think MoBIUS, our energy management service, has the potential to be the most impactful service on a day-to-day basis. Seeing what’s happening at a building in real time allows issues to be fixed before a resident notices and before it becomes a major problem for a client.