Piper Foster Wilder

Founder and CEO, 60Hertz Energy

2023 C3E Entrepreneurship Award Winner

Piper Foster Wilder is the Founder and CEO of 60Hertz Energy. The company offers a Computerized Maintenance Management System software that facilitates maintenance on fleets of distributed energy resources — from microgrids to C&I solar to energy storage. The company has won more than 10 national and international awards for their work, leading to Foster Wilder being inducted into the Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame in 2022. She is also a 2020 Tory Burch Foundation Fellow and former German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has raised more than $3.5M for 60Hertz over the past five years, a company whose customers reside in nine countries, from Nigeria to Mexico to the Canadian Arctic, as well as in the United States. 60Hertz’s mission is to ensure that assets achieve their full useful life and that maintainers achieve their full potential.

Foster Wilder initially moved to Alaska to serve as Deputy Director of the Renewable Energy Alaska Project in Anchorage. There, she became acquainted with the opportunities and challenges of maintenance on remote renewable and diesel microgrids. She came to clean tech through her work at Rocky Mountain Institute. Later she served as Vice President of Amatis Controls, an Internet of Things company where she developed their thermal metering product line destined for solar thermal systems in Austria, Germany, and North America. In 2016, Foster Wilder led a contract with the Colorado Energy Office to develop a solar-thermal-as-a-service program in partnership with six Rural Electric Cooperatives in Colorado’s Western Slope. During this time, she chaired the Board of Directors of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association. Foster Wilder is a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; her published research on best practices in land use planning to accommodate utility-scale renewable installations was conducted in partnership with Ecologic Institute in Berlin. She holds a BA from Whitman College.